Jonathan Schell > Quotes

“It appears that no one is so unfortunate that he or she is exempt from spending cuts, while at the same time no one is so fortunate as to be ineligible for a tax cut”
― Jonathan Schell

“It was not unless one lifted one's gaze from all the allegedly normal events occurring before one's eyes and looked at the executioner's sword hanging over everyone's head that the normality was revealed as a sort of mass insanity. . . Passengers on a ship who are . . . engaging in all the usual shipboard activities appear perfectly normal as long as their ship is sailing safely in quiet seas, but . . . deranged if in full view of them all their ship is caught in a vortex that may shortly drag it and them to destruction.”
― Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth

“Deterence is only a stay of execution, not a reprieve.”
― Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People

“Violence is the method by which the ruthless few can subdue the passive many. Nonviolence is the method by which the active many can overcome the ruthless few.”
― Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People

“EXTERMINATION AS A RADICAL EVIL: The new policies which the extermination of human populations was the objective, states or whole societies were the authors, the instruments of modern science were the means, and for which the concepts of pseudoscience were the rationalization-prompted new thinking about the nature of evil. They precipitated what might be called a crisis in the meaning of evil, by which I mean a crisis in all of the human capacities whereby, once evils have occurred, the world tries, as best it can, to respond to them-to incorporate them into memory and the historical record, to understand them, to take appropriate action against their recurrence.”
― Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth & The Abolition