Sissela Bok Quotes

Deceit and violence - these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings.

Psychologists have found that we are more likely, in looking back at our lives, to remember high points and dramatic shifts in far greater proportion than ongoing stretches of happiness or misery.

The television screen is the lens through which most children learn about violence. Through the magnifying power of this lens, their everyday life becomes suffused by images of shootings, family violence, gang warfare, kidnappings, and everything else that contributes to violence in our society. It shapes their experiences long before they have had the opportunity to consent to such shaping or developed the ability to cope adequately with this knowledge.

Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.

Empathy and fellow feeling form the very basis of morality. The capacities for empathy, for feeling responsibility toward others and for reaching out to help them can be stunted or undermined early on, depending on a child's experiences in the home and neighborhood. It becomes too easy to turn our backs on fellow human beings ... to have 'compassion fatigue.' Technology, we are learning, is not neutral.

I believe that a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society ... if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless.

Liars share with those they deceive the desire not to be deceived.

Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.

While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive.

Some level of truthfulness has always been seen as essential to human society, no matter how deficient the observance of other moral principles.

Three sorts of goods, Aristotle specified, contribute to happiness: goods of the soul, including moral and intellectual virtues and education; bodily goods, such as strength, good health, beauty, and sound senses; and external goods, such as wealth, friends, good birth, good children, good heredity, good reputation and the like.

Trust is a social good to be protected just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink. When it is damaged, the community as a whole suffers; and when it is destroyed, societies falter and collapse

America may be the only society on earth to have experienced what has been called an 'epidemic of children killing children,' which is ravaging some of its communities today.

Much as being active in the antislavery movement of the last century involved more than not engaging in slavery oneself, so joining in an antiviolence movement has to go beyond opting for nonviolence in one's personal life. It calls for engaging in imaginative and forceful practices of nonviolent resistance to violence, including taking a stand toward entertainment violence.