Aphorisms — English

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Ethics

Ubuntu

The belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity.
Source: Ubuntu Documentation Team, retrieved 2017.

Civility

Good manners and respectful behaviors making it easier to live together peacefully, without provocation, harm or degradations, understanding the rules and customs.  

1940

The soldier's humanity

Soldiers ! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you ; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel ! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder !

2011

Governance and philosophy

In ancient times across Greece, China, India, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, philosophy and politics were allies. Philosophical inquiry defined the polis and shaped political discourse. No king saw fit to rule without wise philosophers to counsel him; indeed, the ideal king was often himself a philosopher, in addition to being a spiritual guide and artist or poet...

1948

Duties of mankind

Moral conduct, the noblest flowering of culture inasmuch as spiritual development is the supreme end of human existence and the highest expression thereof, it is the duty of man to serve that end with all his strength and resources...

2011

Art, culture and civilization

Art has been relegated to museums and concert halls rather than being at the center of daily life. Formerly sovereigns not only were sometimes artists themselves but also were frequently active patrons; they recognized that culture and civilization could be preserved, enriched, and passed on by cultivating the arts...

2011

Genocide and cultural ethnocide

Genocide is preceded by cultural ethnocide, or the gradual and deliberate erosion and manipulation of cultural values and practices by political authorities. The dissolution of this cultural foundation (...) makes people incapable of protecting themselves and their communities from the descent into the abyss of mass atrocities; it allows them to be manipulated to commit execrable acts counter to their own time-tested values and traditions.

31st March 1968 (Speech), 9th April 1968 (US Congressional Record)

Remaining Awake Through a triple Revolution

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world." (...)