#aria

It is a considerable point in all good legislation to determine exactly the credibility of witnesses and the proofs of a crime. Every reasonable man, everyone, that is, whose ideas have a certain interconnection and whose feelings accord with those of other men, may be a witness. The true measure of his credibility is nothing other than his interest in telling or not telling the truth; for this reason it is frivolous to insist that women are too weak [to be good witnesses], childish to insist that civil death in a condemned man has the same effects as a real death, and meaningless to insist on the infamy of the infamous, when they have no interest in lying. ↗

— Cesare Beccaria

#crimes-and-punishments #justice #law #witnesses #death

Ah, I see. You don't know much about us and the unknown equals the barbaric, the primitive. Although it is you lot who are ignorant. ↗

— Andrew Ashling

#ignorance #intolerance #knowledge #primitive #unknow

I have always thought that librarians are a little bit like doctors, travel agents and professors all rolled into one. We all know that a great story can lift spirits, take you anywhere in the world you want to go and in any time period to boot, and the lessons you learn from a good book can buoy your own convictions and even change your life. ↗

— Dorothea Benton Frank

#story #change

Here was my lesson in the reach of veterinary medicine, in how an animal doctor may not be the one standing up when disaster strikes and someone shouts, 'Is there a doctor in the house?' but occasionally, if he or she is lucky, a vet can help heal a sick loved one. ↗

— Nick Trout

#love

Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#disease #fatal #first #i #invariably

The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state. ↗

— Adam Michnik

#human-rights #politics #totalitarianism #freedom

We discovered that peace at any price is no peace at all...that life at any price has no value whatever; that life is nothing without the privileges, the prides, the rights, the joys that make it worth living and also worth giving...and that there is something more hideous, more atrocious than war or than death; and that is to live in fear. ↗

— Eve Curie

#humanitarian #inspirational #peace #ww #death

The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country. ↗

— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#conspiracy-theories #democracy #dictatorship #freedom #human-rights

Sometimes, a war saves people. ↗

— José Ramos-Horta

#humanitarianism #pacifism #war #iraq

Ethically they had arrived at the conclusion that man's supremacy over lower animals meant not that the former should prey upon the latter, but that the higher should protect the lower, and that there should be mutual aid between the two as between man and man. They had also brought out the truth that man eats not for enjoyment but to live. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#ethics