Michel de Montaigne
There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
Essays
Martha Nussbaum
That I am an agent, but also a plant; that much that I did not make goes towards making me whatever I shall be praised or blamed for being; that I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing some wrong; that an event that simply happens to me may, without my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust one's good to friends, lovers, or country and to try to have a good life without them--all these I take to be not just the material of tragedy, but everyday facts of lived practical reason.
The Fragility of Goodness
Peter Singer
The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.
Independent on Sunday, 12/11/1999
Carol Gilligan
The blind willingness to sacrifice people to truth, however, has always been the danger of an ethics abstracted from life.
In a Different Voice
Richard Dawkins
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living it is finite.
Unweaving the Rainbow
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