#paternalism

I (John Stone) have never had any great desire to abolish poverty or save fallen women; I am, and always have been, deeply suspicious of those who wish to do these things. They normally cause more harm than good and, in my experience, their desire for power, to control others, is very much greater than that of any businessman. p 455 Stone's Fall ↗

— Iain Pears

#experience

The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so. ↗

— Jane Jacobs

#change

They had started speaking of “women and children”—that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has been repeated a few times. Each felt that all he loved best in the world was at stake, demanded revenge, and was filled with a not unpleasing glow, in which the chilly and half-known features of Miss Quested vanished, and were replaced by all that is sweetest and warmest in private life. “But it’s the women and children,” they repeated, and the Collector knew he ought to stop them intoxicating themselves, but he hadn’t the heart. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#love

For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance. ↗

— Slavoj Žižek

#irishmen #italians #multiculturalism #native-americans #paternalism

Your principle should be to see everything and say nothing. The world changes so rapidly that if you want to get on you cannot afford to align yourself with any person or point of view. ↗

— Khushwant Singh

#philosophy #politics #change

But then it is easy, too easy, to sermonize about the dangers of paternalism and the need to take responsibility for our own lives, from the comfort of our couch in our safe and sanitary home. Aren't we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it? ↗

— Abhijit V. Banerjee

#poverty #skeptics #home