Andrew Collins

“The principle of caution, respecting the gravity of human suffering, weighs against procreating to the extent that it is unpredictable whether the person created will have a good life.”
― Sarah Perry

“And when I think my thinking rouses me to blame he who created me, And I gave peace to my children for they are in the bliss of the abyss
Which surpasses all the pleasures of the world,
And had they been born they would’ve endured misery”
― Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, The Quatrains of Abu'l-Ala: Selected From His "Lozum-Ma-La-Yalzam" And "Sact-Uz-Zind" And Now First Translated Into English

“The full costs of consumption beyond market prices are hard to determine and hard to see, and they are typically underestimated. The benefits of consumption, by contrast, are immediate and tangible, and they are typically overestimated, thanks in part to an enormous and enormously sophisticated marketing apparatus. This asymmetry contributes to our overconsumption.”
― James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

“And this is apparently not without merit. Because in our countries for some time now a great hurricane of subversion has arisen, pushed forward by I do not know what vicious demons—and doubtless in accord with the life-style that we have made our own, unfortunately. This hurricane tries to reverse our traditional order of values, to throw out all that we put forward as being unselfish, gracious and open to the world, open to things and to others, all that is active in dilating our minds and our hearts. It wants to replace it by the single, brutal, arithmetic, and inhuman motivation of profit. Henceforth, all that counts, all that is to be considered and preserved, is what brings profit. The truly ideal aspects of knowledge will not be more valuable than those of interest rates and of financial laws. The only sciences that are to be encouraged are those that teach us how to exploit the earth and the people. Besides that, everything is useless.”
― Jean Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods