Activists from the United Kingdom

"Can the "word" be pinned down to either one period or one church? All churches are, of course, only more or less unsuccessful attempts to represent the unseen to the mind."

"You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis & Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism."

"Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?... I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from their own experience."

"What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine — they are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine — they are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior, jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior."

"I agree as to the doubtful value of competitive examination. The qualities which you really want, viz., self-control, self-reliance, habits of accurate thought, integrity and what you generally call trustworthiness, are not decided by competitive examination, which test little else than the memory."

"Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last."

"I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet — all at the least expense of vital power to the patient."

"No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this — "devoted and obedient." This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman."

"Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, either male or female, as possible. For, mark you, the women have made no improvement — they have only tried to be men and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men."

"It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary, nevertheless, to lay down such a principle, because the actual mortality in hospitals, especially in those of large crowded cities, is very much higher than any calculation founded on the mortality of the same class of diseases among patients treated out of hospital would lead us to expect. The knowledge of this fact first induced me to examine into the influence exercised by hospital construction on the duration and death-rate of cases received into the wards; and it led me to lay before the Social Science Association a paper reprinted with the present title. Since the publication of the first edition of that paper, great advances have been made in the adoption of sound principles of hospital construction; and there are already a number of examples of new hospitals realizing all, or nearly all, the conditions required for the successful treatment of the sick and maimed poor."

"God has taken away the greatest man of his generation, for Dr. Livingstone stood alone."

"Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization, never intended at all even to take in the whole sick population."

"You ask me why I do not write something... I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results."

"The Church is now more like the Scribes and Pharisees than like Christ... What are now called the "essential doctrines" of the Christian religion he does not even mention."

"I never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself."

"Law is the continuous manifestation of God's presence — not reason for believing him absent. Great confusion arises from our using the same word law in two totally distinct senses … as the cause and the effect. It is said that to "explain away" everything by law is to enable us to do without God. But law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table. Law brings us continually back to God instead of carrying us away from him."

"Newton's law is nothing but the statistics of gravitation, it has no power whatever. Let us get rid of the idea of power from law altogether. Call law tabulation of facts, expression of facts, or what you will; anything rather than suppose that it either explains or compels."

"To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose."

"Though he made a joke when asked to do the right thing, he always did it. He was so much more in earnest than he appeared. He did not do himself justice."

"I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have."

"How very little can be done under the spirit of fear."

"I have had a larger responsibility of human lives than ever man or woman had before. And I attribute my success to this — I never gave or took an excuse. Yes, I do see the difference now between me and other men. When a disaster happens, I act and they make excuses."

"The martyr sacrifices herself (himself in a few instances) entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for she (or he) makes the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower."

"Perhaps it is not true to speak of God as a judge at all, or of his judgements. There does not seem to be really any evidence that His worlds are places of trial but rather schools, place of training, or that He is a judge but rather a Teacher, a Trainer, not in the imperfect sense in which men are teachers, but in the sense of His contriving and adapting His whole universe for one purpose of training every intelligent being to be perfect. … I think God would not be the Almighty, the All-Wise, the All-Good, if he were the judge, in the sense that the evangelical and Roman Catholic Christians impute judgement to him. … Our business is, I think, to understand, not to judge. What He does, as far as we know, to rule by law down to the most infinitesimally small portion of His universe, not to judge."

"Perhaps, if prematurely we dismiss ourselves from this world, all may even have to be suffered through again — the premature birth may not contribute to the production of another being, which must be begun again from the beginning."

"Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity — these three — and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised? Men say that God punishes for complaining. No, but men are angry with misery. They are irritated with women for not being happy. They take it as a personal offence. To God alone may women complain without insulting Him!"

"Suffering, sad "female humanity!" What are these feelings which they are taught to consider as disgraceful, to deny to themselves? What form do the Chinese feet assume when denied their proper development? If the young girls of the "higher classes," who never commit a false step, whose justly earned reputations were never sullied even by the stain which the fruit of mere "knowledge of good and evil" leaves behind, were to speak, and say what are their thoughts employed upon, their thoughts, which alone are free, what would they say?"

"By mortifying vanity we do ourselves no good. It is the want of interest in our life which produces it; by filling up that want of interest in our life we can alone remedy it. And, did we even see this, how can we make the difference? How obtain the interest which society declares she does not want, and we cannot want?"

"What are novels? What is the secret of the charm of every romance that ever was written? The first thing in a good novel is to place the persons together in circumstances which naturally call out the high feelings and thoughts of the character, which afford food for sympathy between them on these points — romantic events they are called. The second is that the heroine has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence. These two things constitute the main charm of reading novels."

"Give us back our suffering, we cry to Heaven in our hearts — suffering rather than indifferentism; for out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paralysis! A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore!"

"Passion, intellect, moral activity — these three have never been satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied. To say more on this subject would be to enter into the whole history of society, of the present state of civilisation."

"The progressive world is necessarily divided into two classes — those who take the best of what there is and enjoy it — those who wish for something better and try to create it. Without these two classes the world would be badly off. They are the very conditions of progress, both the one and the other. Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better."

"Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it."

"There is a physical, not moral, impossibility of supplying the wants of the intellect in the state of civilisation at which we have arrived. The stimulus, the training, the time, are all three wanting to us; or, in other words, the means and inducements are not there. Look at the poor lives we lead. It is a wonder that we are so good as we are, not that we are so bad. In looking round we are struck with the power of the organisations we see, not with their want of power. Now and then, it is true, we are conscious that there is an inferior organisation, but, in general, just the contrary."

"Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted, except "suckling their fools "; and women themselves have accepted this, have written books to support it, and have trained themselves so as to consider whatever they do as not of such value to the world or to others, but that they can throw it up at the first "claim of social life." They have accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their " duty " to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves."

"People do not go into the company of their fellow-creatures for what would seem a very sufficient reason, namely, that they have something to say to them, or something that they want to hear from them; but in the vague hope that they may find something to say."

"Society triumphs over many. They wish to regenerate the world with their institutions, with their moral philosophy, with their love. Then they sink to living from breakfast till dinner, from dinner till tea, with a little worsted work, and to looking forward to nothing but bed. When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind — with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?"

"The "dreams of youth" have become a proverb. That organisations, early rich, fall far short of their promise has been repeated to satiety. But is it extraordinary that it should be so? For do we ever utilise this heroism? Look how it lives upon itself and perishes for lack of food. We do not know what to do with it. We had rather that it should not be there. Often we laugh at it. Always we find it troublesome. Look at the poverty of our life! Can we expect anything else but poor creatures to come out of it?"

"The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for — its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be."

"At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this? We go somewhere where we are not wanted and where we don't want to go. What else is conventional life? Passivity when we want to be active. So many hours spent every day in passively doing what conventional life tells us, when we would so gladly be at work. And is it a wonder that all individual life is extinguished?"

"We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the school-master. The governess is to have every one of God's gifts; she is to do that which the mother herself is incapable of doing; but our son must not degrade himself by marrying the governess, nor our daughter the tutor, though she might marry the medical man."

"That man and woman have an equality of duties and rights is accepted by woman even less than by man. Behind his destiny woman must annihilate herself, must be only his complement. A woman dedicates herself to the vocation of her husband; she fills up and performs the subordinate parts in it. But if she has any destiny, any vocation of her own, she must renounce it, in nine cases out of ten."

"To have no food for our heads no food for our hearts, no food for our activity, is that nothing? If we have no food for the body, how do we cry out, how all the world hears of it, how all the newspapers talk of it, with a paragraph headed in great capital letters, DEATH FROM STARVATION! But suppose one were to put a paragraph in the Times, Death of Thought from Starvation, or Death of Moral Activity from Starvation, how people would stare, how they would laugh and wonder! One would think we had no heads nor hearts, by the total indifference of the public towards them. Our bodies are the only things of any consequence."

"Moral activity? There is scarcely such a thing possible! Everything is sketchy. The world does nothing but sketch."

"Look round at the marriages which you know. The true marriage — that noble union, by which a man and woman become together the one perfect being — probably does not exist at present upon earth. It is not surprising that husbands and wives seem so little part of one another. It is surprising that there is so much love as there is. For there is no food for it. What does it live upon — what nourishes it? Husbands and wives never seem to have anything to say to one another. What do they talk about? Not about any great religious, social, political questions or feelings. They talk about who shall come to dinner, who is to live in this lodge and who in that, about the improvement of the place, or when they shall go to London. If there are children, they form a common subject of some nourishment. But, even then, the case is oftenest thus, — the husband is to think of how they are to get on in life; the wife of bringing them up at home. But any real communion between husband and wife — any descending into the depths of their being, and drawing out thence what they find and comparing it — do we ever dream of such a thing? Yes, we may dream of it during the season of "passion," but we shall not find it afterwards. We even expect it to go off, and lay our account that it will. If the husband has, by chance, gone into the depths of his being, and found there anything unorthodox, he, oftenest, conceals it carefully from his wife, — he is afraid of "unsettling her opinions.""

"Religious men are and must be heretics now — for we must not pray, except in a "form" of words, made beforehand — or think of God but with a prearranged idea."

"Men and women meet now to be idle. Is it extraordinary that they do not know each other, and that, in their mutual ignorance, they form no surer friendships? Did they meet to do something together, then indeed they might form some real tie. But, as it is, they are not there, it is only a mask which is there — a mouth-piece of ready-made sentences about the "topics of the day"; and then people rail against men for choosing a woman "for her face" — why, what else do they see?"

"It is very well to say "be prudent, be careful, try to know each other." But how are you to know each other? Unless a woman had lost all pride, how is it possible for her, under the eyes of all her family, to indulge in long exclusive conversations with a man? "Such a thing" must not take place till after her "engagement." And how is she to make an engagement, if "such a thing" has not taken place?"

"A girl, if she has any pride, is so ashamed of having anything she wishes to say out of the hearing of her own family, she thinks it must be something so very wrong, that it is ten to one, if she have the opportunity of saying it, that she will not. And yet she is spending her life, perhaps, in dreaming of accidental means of unrestrained communion."

"It is thought pretty to say that "Women have no passion." If passion is excitement in the daily social intercourse with men, women think about marriage much more than men do; it is the only event of their lives. It ought to be a sacred event, but surely not the only event of a woman's life, as it is now. Many women spend their lives in asking men to marry them, in a refined way. Yet it is true that women are seldom in love. How can they be?"

"Women dream till they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last. All their plans and visions seem vanished, and they know not where; gone, and they cannot recall them. They do not even remember them. And they are left without the food of reality or of hope. Later in life, they neither desire nor dream, neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect. The last often survives the longest. They wish, if their experiences would benefit anybody, to give them to someone. But they never find an hour free in which to collect their thoughts, and so discouragement becomes ever deeper and deeper, and they less and less capable of undertaking anything."

"It seems as if the female spirit of the world were mourning everlastingly over blessings, not lost, but which she has never had, and which, in her discouragement she feels that she never will have, they are so far off."

"Jesus Christ raised women above the condition of mere slaves, mere ministers to the passions of the man, raised them by His sympathy, to be Ministers of God. He gave them moral activity. But the Age, the World, Humanity, must give them the means to exercise this moral activity, must give them intellectual cultivation, spheres of action."

"Nothing can well be imagined more painful than the present position of woman, unless, on the one hand, she renounces all outward activity and keeps herself within the magic sphere, the bubble of her dreams; or, on the other, surrendering all aspiration, she gives herself to her real life, soul and body. For those to whom it is possible, the latter is best; for out of activity may come thought, out of mere aspiration can come nothing."

"The time is come when women must do something more than the "domestic hearth," which means nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party."

"The great reformers of the world turn into the great misanthropists, if circumstances or organisation do not permit them to act. Christ, if He had been a woman, might have been nothing but a great complainer. Peace be with the misanthropists! They have made a step in progress; the next will make them great philanthropists; they are divided but by a line. The next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ. But do we see one woman who looks like a female Christ? or even like "the messenger before" her "face", to go before her and prepare the hearts and minds for her? To this will be answered that half the inmates of Bedlam begin in this way, by fancying that they are "the Christ." People talk about imitating Christ, and imitate Him in the little trifling formal things, such as washing the feet, saying His prayer, and so on; but if anyone attempts the real imitation of Him, there are no bounds to the outcry with which the presumption of that person is condemned."

"Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the things of sense into communion with God — to endeavour to partake of the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness. When we ask ourselves only what is right, or what is the will of God (the same question), then we may truly be said to live in His light."

"What is Mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for " The Kingdom of Heaven is within"? Heaven is neither a place nor a time. There might be a Heaven not only here but now. It is true that sometimes we must sacrifice not only health of body, but health of mind (or, peace) in the interest of God; that is, we must sacrifice Heaven. But "thou shalt be like God for thou shalt see Him as He is": this may be here and now, as well as there and then. And it may be for a time — then lost — then recovered — both here and there, both now and then."

"That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics — as is more particularly set forth in a definition of the 16th century: "True religion is to have no other will but God's." Compare this with the definition of Religion in Johnson's Dictionary: "Virtue founded upon reverence of God and expectation of future rewards and punishments"; in other words on respect and self-interest, not love. Imagine the religion which inspired the life of Christ "founded" on the motives given by Dr. Johnson! Christ Himself was the first true Mystic. "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me and to finish His work." What is this but putting in fervent and the most striking words the foundation of all real Mystical Religion? — which is that for all our actions, all our words, all our thoughts, the food upon which they are to live and have their being is to be the indwelling presence of God, the union with God; that is, with the Spirit of Goodness and Wisdom."

"Where shall I find God? In myself. That is the true Mystical Doctrine. But then I myself must be in a state for Him to come and dwell in me. This is the whole aim of the Mystical Life; and all Mystical Rules in all times and countries have been laid down for putting the soul into such a state. That the soul herself should be heaven, that our Father which is in heaven should dwell in her, that there is something within us infinitely more estimable than often comes out, that God enlarges this "palace of our soul" by degrees so as to enable her to receive Himself, that thus he gives her liberty but that the soul must give herself up absolutely to Him for Him to do this, the incalculable benefit of this occasional but frequent intercourse with the Perfect: this is the conclusion and sum of the whole matter, put into beautiful language by the Mystics. And of this process they describe the steps, and assign periods of months and years during which the steps, they say, are commonly made by those who make them at all."

"These old Mystics whom we call superstitious were far before us in their ideas of God and of prayer (that is of our communion with God). "Prayer," says a mystic of the 16th century, "is to ask not what we wish of God, but what God wishes of us." "Master who hast made and formed the vessel of the body of Thy creature, and hast put within so great a treasure, the Soul, which bears the image of Thee": so begins a dying prayer of the 14th century. In it and in the other prayers of the Mystics there is scarcely a petition. There is never a word of the theory that God's dealings with us are to show His "power"; still less of the theory that "of His own good pleasure" He has " predestined" any souls to eternal damnation. There is little mention of heaven for self; of desire of happiness for self, none. It is singular how little mention there is either of "intercession " or of " Atonement by Another's merits." True it is that we can only create a heaven for ourselves and others "by the merits of Another," since it is only by working in accordance with God's Laws that we can do anything. But there is nothing at all in these prayers as if God's anger had to be bought off, as if He had to be bribed into giving us heaven by sufferings merely "to satisfy God's justice." In the dying prayers, there is nothing of the "egotism of death." It is the reformation of God's church — that is, God's children, for whom the self would give itself, that occupies the dying thoughts. There is not often a desire to be released from trouble and suffering. On the contrary, there is often a desire to suffer the greatest suffering, and to offer the greatest offering, with even greater pain, if so any work can be done. And still, this, and all, is ascribed to God's goodness. The offering is not to buy anything by suffering, but — If only the suppliant can do anything for God's children! These suppliants did not live to see the " reformation" of God's children. No more will any who now offer these prayers. But at least we can all work towards such practical " reformation." The way to live with God is to live with Ideals — not merely to think about ideals, but to do and suffer for them. Those who have to work on men and women must above all things have their Spiritual Ideal, their purpose, ever present. The "mystical " state is the essence of common sense."

"I have read half your book thro' and I am immensely charmed by it. But some things I disagree with and more I do not understand. This does not apply to the characters, but to your conclusions, e.g. you say "women are more sympathetic than men." Now if I were to write a book out of my experience I should begin Women have no sympathy. Yours is the tradition. Mine is the conviction of experience. I have never found one woman who has altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions. Now look at my experience of men. A statesman, past middle age, absorbed in politics for a quarter of a century, out of sympathy with me, remodels his whole life and policy — learns a science the driest, the most technical, the most difficult, that of administration, as far as it concerns the lives of men, — not, as I learnt it, in the field from stirring experience, but by writing dry regulations in a London room by my sofa with me. This is what I call real sympathy."

"Now just look at the degree in which women have sympathy — as far as my experience is concerned. And my experience of women is almost as large as Europe. And it is so intimate too. I have lived and slept in the same bed with English Countesses and Prussian Bauerinnen [farm laborers]. No Roman Catholic Supérieure [president of a French university system known for their diverse, eclectic teaching methods] has ever had charge of women of the different creeds that I have had. No woman has excited "passions" among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me. My doctrines have taken no hold among women. … No woman that I know has ever appris à apprendre [learned to learn]. And I attribute this to want of sympathy. You say somewhere that women have no attention. Yes. And I attribute this to want of sympathy. … It makes me mad, the Women's Rights talk about "the want of a field" for them — when I know that I would gladly give £500 a year [roughly $50,000 a year in 2008] for a Woman Secretary. And two English Lady Superintendents have told me the same thing. And we can't get one."

"In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. … Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. … They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?"

"People often say to me, You don't know what a wife and mother feels. No, I say, I don't and I'm very glad I don't. And they don't know what I feel. … I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from his own experience."

"Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone."

"I think I have never known a woman labour as she has done. It is a most remarkable experience; she indeed deserves the name of a worker."

"One of my most valued acquaintances was Miss Florence Nightingale, then a young lady at home, but chafing against the restrictions that crippled her active energies. Many an hour we spent by my fireside in Thavies Inn, or walking in the beautiful grounds of Embley, discussing the problem of the present and hopes of the future. To her, chiefly, I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine, its foundation and its crown."

"The subscription has been the result of voluntary individual offerings, and the amount of £4195 15s. 6d., already received, plainly indicates the universal feeling of gratitude which exists among the troops engaged in the Crimea for the care bestowed upon, the relief administered to, themselves and their comrades, at the period of their greatest sufferings, by the skilful arrangements, the unwearying, constant, personal attention of Miss Nightingale and the other ladies associated with her."

"Though known as the founder of the Red Cross, and the originator of the Diplomatic Convention of Geneva, it was to Miss Florence Nightingale that all the honour of that Convention was due. It was her work in the Crimea that inspired him to go to Italy during the war of 1859, to share the horrors of war, to relieve the helplessness of the unfortunate victims in those great struggles, and to soothe the physical and moral distress and anguish of so many poor men who had come from all parts to fall victims to their duty."

"Her statistics were more than a study, they were indeed her religion... Florence Nightingale believed — and in all the actions of her life acted upon that belief — that the administrator could only be successful if he were guided by statistical knowledge. The legislator — to say nothing of the politician — too often failed for want of this knowledge. Nay, she went further; she held that the universe — including human communities — was evolving in accordance with a divine plan; that it was man's business to endeavor to understand this plan and guide his actions in sympathy with it. But to understand God's thoughts, she held we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose. Thus the study of statistics was for her a religious duty."

"Speaking of the cholera in the Middlesex Hospital, she said, "The prostitutes come in perpetually — poor creatures staggering off their beat! It took worse hold of them than any. One poor girl, loathsomely filthy, came in, and was dead in four hours. I held her in my arms and I heard her saying something. I bent down to hear. 'Pray God, that you may never be in the despair I am in at this time.' I said, 'Oh, my girl, are you not now more merciful than the God you think you are going to? Yet the real God is far more merciful than any human creature ever was, or can ever imagine.'""

"They had in Miss Nightingale a woman of genius, who had made her subject her particular study... Moreover, he had no hesitation in saying that Miss Nightingale in her present position had exhibited greater power of organisation, a greater familiarity with details, while at the same time she took a comprehensive view of the general bearing of the subject, than had marked the conduct of any one connected with the hospitals during the present war. (Cheers.) An anecdote which had lately been sent to him by a correspondent, showed her great power over all with whom she came into contact. Here was the passage:—"I have just heard such a pretty account from a soldier describing the comfort it was to see even Florence pass—‘She would speak to one and another, and nod and smile to a many more; but she couldn't do it to all, you know, for we lay there by hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again content.’" And his correspondent then very justly remarked,—"What poetry there is in these men!" And again:—"I think I told you of another, who said, ‘Before she came there was such cussin and swearin, but after that it was as holy as a church.’" He had been told, too, by eye-witnesses that it was most singular to remark how, when men, frenzied, perhaps, by their wounds and disease, had worked themselves into a passionate refusal to submit to necessary operations, a few calm sentences of hers seemed at once to allay the storm, and the men would submit willingly to the painful ordeal they had to undergo. They could not pretend to offer to such a woman any recompense for her services without lowering their high standard. The only suitable mark of gratitude which could be shown her would be one which would testify the confidence of the English people in her energy, ability, and zeal."

"In an undertaking so wholly new to our English customs, so at variance with the usual education given to women in this country, we shall meet with perplexities, difficulties, even failures... It will be the true, the lasting glory of Florence Nightingale and her band of devoted assistants, that they have broken through what Goethe calls a "Chinese wall of prejudices;" prejudices religious, social, professional; and established a precedent which will indeed "multiply the good to all time.""

"If the generous women thus sacrificing themselves were all alike in devotion to their sacred cause, there was one of them —the Lady-in-Chief—who not only came armed with the special experience needed, but also was clearly transcendent in that subtle quality which gives to one human being a power of command over others. Of slender, delicate form, engaging, highly-bred, and in council a rapt careful listener, so long as others were speaking, and strongly, though gently, persuasive whenever speaking herself, the Lady-in-Chief—the Lady Florence, Miss Nightingale—gave her heart to his enterprise in a spirit of absolute devotion."

"Lo! in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom. And flit from room to room."

"A Lady with a Lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good. Heroic womanhood."

"History can be helpful in making sense of the world we live in. It can also be fascinating, even fun. How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history? There is a thirst out there both for knowledge and to be entertained, and the market has responded with enthusiasm."

"In literature, books which disclosed life and its miseries, and character with its sufferings, burnt themselves in upon her mind, and created much of her future effort. She was never resorted to for sentiment. Sentimentalists never had a chance with her. Besides that her character was too strong, and its quality too real for any sympathy with shallowness and egotism, she had two characteristics which might well daunt the sentimentalists—her reserve, and her capacity for ridicule. Ill would they have fared who had come to her for responsive sympathies about sentiment, or even real woes in which no practical help was proposed; and there is perhaps nothing uttered by her, from her evidence before the Sanitary Commission for the Army to her recently published Notes on Nursing, which does not disclose powers of irony which self-regardant persons may well dread."

"While history abides, the image of Florence Nightingale, lamp in hand, going through miles of beds, night by night, noting every patient as she went, and ministering wherever most wanted, will always glow in men's hearts; and the sayings of the men about her will be traditions for future generations to enjoy."

"The intense and exquisite humanity to the sick, underlying the glorious common sense about affairs, and the stern insight into the weaknesses and the perversions of the healthy, troubled as they are by the sight of suffering, and sympathising with themselves instead of the patient, lay open a good deal of the secret of this wonderful woman's life and power."

"Her chief contribution to the inheritance of the race has been that, besides demonstrating in action the full perfection of the allied arts of nursing and sanitation, she has left in her writings a philosophy, as it were, of nursing, together with an intellectual demonstration of the scientific and natural basis of hygiene and its practical application, and has laid down once and for all their essential underlying principles with a clarity, a logic, an originality, and a depth of reflection that mark the genius and place her works among the classics."

"Great as Miss Nightingale was as a nurse, her nursing reflected only a part of her genius. She was, perhaps, even greater as a teacher, and without a doubt greatest as a sanitarian. Though it was by her nursing that she seized and held the hearts and imaginations of men—so that those who know nothing further of her know that she was the heroine of the Crimea and the reformer of nursing,—it is the intellectual quality of her deep insight into problems of health that keeps her work and will always keep it fresh and vivid."

"Miss Nightingale in appearance, is just what you would expect in any other well-bred woman, who may have seen perhaps rather more than thirty years of life; her manner and countenance are prepossessing, and this without the possession of positive beauty; it is a face not easily forgotten, pleasing in its smile, with an eye betokening great self possession, and giving when she wishes, a quiet look of firm determination to every feature. Her general demeanour is quiet and rather reserved; still I am much mistaken if she is not gifted with a very lively sense of the ridiculous. In conversation, she speaks on matters of business with a grave earnestness, one would not expect from her appearance. She has evidently a mind disciplined to restrain under the principles of the action of the moment, every feeling which would interfere with it. She has trained herself to command, and learned the value of conciliation towards others, and constraint over herself. I can conceive her to be a strict disciplinarian; she throws herself into a work—as it's Head—as such she knows well how much success must depend upon literal obedience to her every order. She seems to understand business thoroughly, though to me she had the failure common to many "Heads," a too great love of management in the small details which had better perhaps have been left to others. Her nerve is wonderful; I have been with her at very severe operations; she was more than equal to the trial. She has an utter disregard of contagion; I have known her spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever. The more awful to every sense any particular case, especially if it was that of a dying man, her slight form would be seen bending over him, administering to his ease in every way in her power, and seldom quitting his side till death released him."

"Miss Nightingale raised the art of nursing in this country from a menial employment to an honoured vocation; she taught nurses to be ladies, and she brought ladies out of the bondage of idleness to be nurses. This, which was the aim of her life, was no fruit of her Crimean experience, although that experience enabled her to give effect to her purpose more readily than were otherwise possible. Long before she went to the Crimea she felt deeply the "disgraceful antithesis" between Mrs. Gamp and a sister of mercy. The picture of her at Scutari is of a strong-willed, strong-nerved energetic woman, gentle and pitiful to the wounded, but always masterful among those with whom she worked. After the war she worked with no less zeal or resolution, and realised many of her early dreams. She was not only the reformer of nursing but a leader of women."

"If our social arrangements were so adjusted that each person could follow that calling in life which they are by nature adapted for, what a great gainer society as a whole would be. These few who are so fortunate as to be able to follow the calling of their heart’s desire make a success of life. Florence Nightingale was one of the fortunate few, who could engage in that occupation for which she was best adapted. Florence Nightingale was a born nurse. In her was found that rare combination of heart, brain and sympathy which makes the ideal nurse. It is when one is laid low by the ravages of disease that they can appreciate to its utmost depth the value of human kindness...In the future, when the war drum will be heard no more, and the only reveille to be sounded will be that which shall call men to the peaceful walks of life, the name of Florence Nightingale will be revered, as a woman who, though delicate and far removed from want, nevertheless was willing to risk her own life, that she might bring relief to that most stupid victim of our present system, the soldier."

"The woman activist or artist born of a family-centered mother may in any case feel that her mother cannot understand or sympathize with the imperatives of her life; or that her mother has preferred and valued a more conventional daughter, or a son. In order to study nursing, Florence Nightingale was forced to battle, in the person of her mother, the restrictive conventions of upper-class Victorian womanhood, the destiny of a life in drawing rooms and country houses in which she saw women going mad "for want of something to do.""

"Emily Dickinson was always stirred by the existences of women like George Eliot or Elizabeth Barrett, who possessed strength of mind, articulateness, and energy. (She once characterized Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale as "holy"-one suspects she merely meant, "great.")"

"I had been in the "home" less than a week when an invitation came from Miss Nightingale for me to visit her in her London home. Shall I ever forget the excitement that invitation caused? Miss Crossland told me Miss Nightingale would ask my opinion of the different nurses, both ladies and others, and I could see that there was a little anxiety felt concerning the answers I might give. I went on the appointed day and must say I did not feel quite at my ease as the maid took me to Miss Nightingale's room, but one look into those kind, clear-blue eyes, and the hearty grasp of the little hand quite set me at ease, and before I knew it I was talking as freely to her, who had done more than any one woman living to alleviate suffering, as I would have to a life-long friend."

"I went from Edinburgh for a few days with Miss Nightingale, and received from her words of encouragement which have lasted all these years. In one of her letters to me just as I was leaving England she bade me and our profession "god-speed," saying, "Outstrip us, that we in turn may outstrip you again.""

"Every element of army hygiene, diet, shelter, ventilation, latrines, clothing, rest periods, provision of orderlies, was to be codified. Miss Nightingale, drawing upon excellent advice from her Crimea cronies, provided the codes. Together the Notes constitute an astonishing example of her gift for imagining palpable needs and assembling workable remedies. She was creating a self-acting, self-regulating system, embodying individual will-power in action, designed to secure the maximum output of useful work for the total money and manpower expended."

"She is rather high in stature, fair in complexion, and slim in person; her hair is brown, and is worn quite plain; her physiognomy is most pleasing; her eyes, of a bluish tint, speak volumes, and are always sparkling with intelligence; her mouth is small and well formed, while her lips act in unison, and make known the impression of her heart—one seems the reflex of the other. Her visage, as regards expression, is very remarkable, and one can almost anticipate by her countenance what she is about to say: alternately, with matters of the most grave import, a gentle smile passes radiantly over her countenance, thus proving her evenness of temper; at other times, when wit or a pleasantry prevails, the heroine is lost in the happy, good-natured smile which pervades her face, and you recognise only the charming woman. Her dress is generally of a greyish or black tint; she wears a simple white cap, and often a rough apron. In a word, her whole appearance is religiously simple and unsophisticated. In conversation no member of the fair sex can be more amiable and gentle than Miss Nightingale. Removed from her arduous and cavalier-like duties, which require the nerve of a Hercules,—and she possesses it when required,—she is Rachel on the stage in both tragedy and comedy."

"Wherever there is disease in its most dangerous form, and the hand of the spoiler distressingly high, there is that incomparable woman sure to be seen; her benignant presence is an influence for good comfort even amid the struggles of expiring nature. She is a "ministering angel" without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night, and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds."

"We have made Miss Nightingale's acquaintance and are delighted and very much struck with her great gentleness, simplicity, and wonderful clear and comprehensive head. I wish we had her at the War Office. Her modesty and unselfishness are really hardly to be believed, and she is so ladylike."

"Florence Nightingale lifted the vague, casual, though kindly and devoted, feeling of women into organized, efficient and invaluable service; she enlarged the nurse’s vision to sympathy for great groups outside her family or particular tribe."

"Her position in Indian affairs was even more extraordinary than her position at the War Office. She had never been to India, she never did go to India, and yet she was considered an expert on India and consulted on its affairs by men who had lived there all their working lives. This knowledge was the reward of her enormous labours on the Station Reports. To her bedroom had come a return from almost every military station in India, not from one Presidency or one district but the entire Peninsula. Year after year she had toiled, examining, classifying, grouping. She possessed prodigious powers of absorbing, retaining, and marshaling masses of facts, and when she had completed her task the whole vast teeming country lay before her mind's eye like a map."

"Twenty years ago we heard many predictions that there would be no Indians left in Brazil by the end of the decade. These gloomy forecasts were wholly wrong. We are now optimists — hopeful that right thinking will prevail and the destruction of tribal peoples and their environments will stop. Tribal peoples will survive against extraordinary odds — but they do need the help of concerned people throughout the world."

"My interaction with the Himalayan tribespeople overturned my pre-conceptions. There was no superior or inferior being. I was just a human being like them [...] I lived with people who had no electricity or cars and yet they lived very fulfilling lives. They had no schools but they were very intelligent people. I became even more thirsty to understand and learn more about the tribes people of the world."

"The tragic destruction of the Gana and Gwi Bushmen reaches into the very roots of humanity and touches not only every human being alive today, but the generations yet to be born. The Gana and Gwi call themselves ’first people of the Kalahari', they might as well say, ’first people of the world'. They have been here longer than any of us. They are the last survivors of the world's first modern humans. It is not up to the Botswana government to wipe them out of history, with nothing more than an arbitrary and cruel presidential directive in favour of just more wealth for the country's elite – and of course the fantastically rich owners of De Beers. We will fight for the Bushmen's right to survive however long it takes. If they lose, then we will make certain that the crimes which brought their end are not expunged, but written large into history. Twenty-first century governments can no longer destroy indigenous tribes with impunity."

"Would people still use the same demeaning language talking about European gypsies or immigrants? It is fundamentally an old, 19th-century throwback to the idea that that these people are somehow like our ancestors, or backward. It conveys that they are somehow not as intelligent as we are; that they haven't progressed as far as we have. It is fundamentally a colonial mentality."

"Every time another tribe becomes extinct and their language dies, another way of life and another way of understanding the world disappears forever. Even if it has been painstakingly studied and recorded, a language without a people to speak it means little. A language can only live if its people live, and if today’s uncontacted tribes are to have a future, we must respect their right to choose their own way of life."

"In the relentless search for advancement and material progress we have perhaps alienated ourselves from our Earth. I feeltingly witnessed this innate appreciation of belonging when the Colombian Indians greeted strangers on a street in Bogatá. Tribal people are the beacons that illuminate the importance of these connections. If we destroy them, we smother these lights, and so make our future far less human. I believe their survival, far from being a fringe concern, is one of the greatest humanitarian concerns of our time."

"Governments, corporations and assorted others regularly exploit the idea that tribal peoples are "primitive" in order to remove them from their land or open it up to outsiders, thereby freeing up access to the natural resources on or under their land. Often this is done in the name of "development", justified on the grounds that the so-called "primitive" tribes are backward and out-of-date and need to "catch up" with the rest of us. But what are the consequences? For the tribes, they are almost always catastrophic: cultural and spiritual alienation, poverty, alcoholism, disease and death."

"Where there’s money to be made from Amazonia, whether from cutting it down or taking its riches whilst leaving it standing, Indian tribes end up dead. That was the story a hundred years ago, and it’s the story today. A century of human rights declarations and more and more elaborate schemes to save the forest, haven’t made much difference; they won’t until the Indians, whose land this is, are put at the centre of the debate. They have proved time and time again that they are by far the best custodians of their own land."

"As the saying goes - the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance. Politicians have taken advantage of our indifference by imposing ever more draconian and restrictive laws that increase their power while diminishing ours. Asking questions of our public bodies is the best way to ensure they are working for our interests and not those of politicians. Through FOI we can go behind political rhetoric to see the true state of affairs."

"The success of any freedom of information regime depends on two main factors: A tightly drawn law with a clear statement of intent that makes clear statement of intent that makes clear a presumption of openness, and a bold regulator who is tough and not afraid to exert his authority and challenge government interests."

"The cost of making government more responsive to the people who fund it and in whose name it exists should not be attributed solely to FOI, but even if it is, surely that is a cost worth bearing? Making government transparent and accountable to the public directly increases the efficiency of the public sector more than any number of government regulators or watchdogs."

"Getting information is only the beginning. Transparency in government must be accompanied by the public's right to be heard and to influence government policy. The first objective is to get the facts, for without facts we are powerless to oppose government decisions or bring about change. The next step is to open up the decision-making process so we finally have a government accountable to those it serves. This should be our right and not a privilege."

"You should not expect politicians to promote freedom of information. Why should they? They have a vested interest in controlling the public's access to information and thereby maintaining their grip on power."

"Politicians may initially find it difficult to accept new standards of public accountability, but we must make the costs of not doing so even greater. The best way to do this is by publicly embarrassing and shaming those officials and departments who refuse to answer to the public."

"Maybe you would prefer not to be bothered with how the government is run. If that's the case then you have no right to complain when your taxes are raised, or if your children's education is substandard, or you have to wait a year for a vital operation. Good government does not happen by itself but is the result of individual effort. One of the easiest and most effective things you can do is simply to ask for information. I hope I've given you the tools and confidence to do exactly that."

"In secrecy, bureaucracies grow large, ungainly and unaccountable to those they are meant to serve. When there is no fierce spotlight of public accountability shining, there is no pressure to ensure systems are streamlined or even working. What you find throughout any bureaucracy protected by secrecy is a cesspit of illogic and waste. And because the state keeps rebranding, shifting responsibility from one set of bureaucrats to another, most of the work being done is for the purpose of keeping other bureaucrats in employment rather than satisfying the needs of the public."

"In the public sphere, perception is reality: it's more important to be seen to do something than actually to do it. At least when private companies use PR and advertising they must spend their own money and there are other corporations vying for our business. If a company doesn't give us what we want they face bankruptcy. Public institutions, however, are monopolies. We have no choice but to buy, if not use, their services. If we don't like the way our particular police force operates it's not like we can choose another one or even withhold the money used to run the one we don't like. We're forced - under threat of imprisonment - to pay for a monopoly service and for it to tell us how great it is. This is the real danger of institutional PR. In the absence of competition it is only through a diversity of opinion and public scrutiny that some level of accountability can exist. PR stifles debate and suppresses opinion through the use of centralized press offices and communication protocols."

"Bureaucracy is the business of controlling other humans, making them do what you want them to do. That may be acceptable if what you are asking them to do is reasonable, rational and for the common good, but more likely what bureaucrats ask is treasonable, nonsensical and counterproductive to the public good. This is because the primary business of a bureaucrat, left unchecked, is creating more bureaucracy to further his or her own prestige and power. The result is that rules are in place serving no function but to keep bureaucrats in work and to expand their bureaucratic fiefdom. Before you know it you can't even hold a village fete without filling out more than fifteen different forms from various arms of the government."

"There are three main things the public need to know about courts:"

"Once the right of the people to see justice being done is eroded, it is not long before there is no justice at all."

"We are at an extraordinary moment in human history: never before has the possibility of true democracy been so close to realisation. At the cost of publishing and duplication has dropped to near zero, a truly free press, and a truly informed public, becomes a reality. A new Information Enlightment is dawning where knowledge flows freely, beyond national boundaries. Technology is breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography, replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency. In this new Enlightenment it isn't just scientific truths that are the goal, but discovering truths about the way we live, about politics and power."

"Citizens around the world have long declared a desire to be trusted with the formation of their own opinions, and that can only come when they have access to the facts. This is the essence of the information war. Do we trust citizens to communicate freely and come to their own conclusions, or do we believe those in authority have a right to restrict and manipulate what we know? Do we hold to Enlightenment ideals of reason and the pursuit of truth no matter where that takes us, or put our faith in authority to make certain an uncertain world?"

"The Internet is powerful because it allows people to organise around issues at unprecedented speed, broadcast their thoughts and challenge those in charge. A wave of such groups banded together in early 2011 to demand the removal of authoritarian leaders in the Middle East as one country after another rose up with varying degrees of success. But the Internet doesn't cause revolution. It is a communications network. What people choose to do with technology - that is where we can make moral judgements. Some people will use it for ill, others for good. Security forces tend to focus on the ills, while the majority use it for good. In the name of protecting us from 'bad things on the Internet' there are increasing moves to suppress communications networks in both repressive and democratic countries. Demands to shut down, censor, filter or in other ways oversee and control the way people communicate are on the rise."

"At a time of information overload, good journalists are more important then ever. They serve as the public's hired guns to collect information from various sources and challenge it for the purpose of distilling down what is important and true. They-signpost issues that are worthy of our attention. In the past when we bought newspapers we were paying for that particular newspaper with its content- a bundle of news and entertainment. In the digital age we're buying the carriage (e.g. the Internet access) and readers decide later what information they want to view over that carrier."

"Being a professional journalist is rather like training to be a lawyer. There's a certain amount you can learn in school but largely it is a vocation learned through practice, with scepticism being a primary attribute."

"The powerful have historically tried to impose their will through mechanisms of enforced ignorance such as censorship, secrecy, threats, physical intimidation and violence. This model is difficult to sustain in a networked world based on Enlightenment values. This is not to say that Western democracies have abandoned these heavy-handed tactics, but more often the methods have shifted to more sophisticated ways of maintaining power such as media management, public relations and legal intimidation. In the midst of all this information and misinformation how can we filter out what is important and true?"

"When a politician claims for example that 'crime is down' since he implemented a certain policy, it is the professional investigative journalist who knows the raw data on which this statement is based (criminal incident reports) and who asks for verification. He or she can then go to other sources to question the veracity of the data. The reason I specialise in the intricate details of bureaucracy isn't because I have a passion for paper-pushers, but rather because I need to know all the types of information collected, by whom and where they are stored so I can get my hands on them. A statement isn't a fact. Even when the person making the statement is an authority he or she still needs to provide evidence or proof that what they say is the truth and a professional journalist should be asking for this proof and supplying it for public scrutiny. All this accumulating of statements, data and information which then has to be verified takes time. But this is the only thing a journalist does that marks him out as a professional. It's the only reason anyone would choose a well-known newspaper's website over an unknown blog. The newspaper as a brand has built up, over time, a reputation for challenging the powerful and giving people meaningful, true information. The press is not like any other business and what it sells shouldn't just be rehashed press releases or celebrity gossip, but the civic information necessary for people to understand their society and participate in it. It is a check on political and financial power, or at least it should be."

"Leaks have happened before. They are not new. But the industrial scale of leaking made possible through the digitisation of information and the ability to communicate instantly across the globe - that is new. If it is to be revolutionary, however, we need a model for a new type of politics."

"Free speech is not the great danger for humanity. Concentration of power is. We learn this lesson over and over again, and yet seem compelled eternally to repeat it. Communism, colonialism, monarchy, state socialism, tyranny- all become enemies of the people because they offer their citizens not too many opportunities to communicate or associate, but too few. Power is the dynamic force that fuels politics and it is this, not speech, which needs to be constantly monitored, controlled and checked. We view crimes against humanity as aberrations, individuals gone wild, when we should be seeing them through the prism of power. Abuse happens when a culture values some people more than others and those exercising power are not accountable for their actions."

"Authoritarians offer citizens a deal: if we hand over our freedom, they will guarantee certainty and safety. This might have been possible in a closed society with little interaction between people, but it is a false promise in a knowledge economy where citizens are interconnected. If the best chaos theorists can't model the weather beyond a week, how does the National Security Agency think it can predict which of us will turn into a terrorist? If our intelligence agencies persist in monopolising knowledge we will see continued intelligence failures."

"Over the past year I've thought a lot about censorship, surveillance and regulation of the Internet. Is it necessary? Is it really so dangerous to allow individuals an ability to associate and communicate freely? Certainly there exists a criminal minority who take advantage of the freedom of the Internet, but no one is arguing that crimes shouldn't be prosecuted. This is about allowing the vast majority of people to communicate without state intervention. Despite all the dire warnings, the prophesies of doom and destruction that were foretold by the Pentagon, the US State Department, Hosni Mubarak, even English High Court Judge Eady, I look at the fallout from all that was published in 2010, all the breaches to establishment power that occurred through a networked citizenry- and the good clearly outweighs the bad. From the uprising in Iceland to the ousting of dictators in the Middle East, free speech has fundamentally changed the world for the good."

"Why, then, are the world's governments intent on controlling and regulating the Internet? Free speech is most threatening to authoritarian systems such as autocracies, militaries, the police and security services. Security services in principle exist for our protection but that is so only when they are accountable to the public for their considerable power. We are seeing a push by these agencies to move beyond the rule of law, to be accountable to no one but themselves. National security is becoming the new word of God to which all must submit in blind obedience. The decisions made, the liberties eroded, the crimes committed in the name of national security cannot be challenged because the information on which they are based remains secret."

"We seek a saviour, someone to rescue us from the problems of the world. A saviour is the simple story, the easy option and that is why it is so compelling. You don't have to do anything except believe. There's no need to negotiate with other people, or figure out how to create a robust system within the bizarre and contradictory parameters of human nature. I must admit I fell prey to this when I first met Julian Assange. He was going to lead the way to a bold new age. Instead I learned that power when concentrated is dangerous no matter who holds it or for whatever good intention. The real revolution happens in our own minds, when we stop believing there is someone or some agency who has all the answers, who is infallible and will save us, and instead come to realise we have that ability within ourselves. We may be susceptible to cults of personality, but we can build a check against this into our political systems."

"The world may be more complex and uncertain than we would like, but giving away our freedom for the false promises of protection is not a sustainable solution. We are defined not just by what we preach, but by what we practice. We cannot claim to be an enlightened democratic society if we live in breach of these values, without the rule of law, without reason, or the rigorous commitment to truth."

"We now have a technology that unites individuals in such a way that we can create the first global democracy. Hundreds of millions of people are climbing out of poverty and the Internet gives them access to the sort of information that was previously accessible only to elite scholars. They can join a worldwide conversation and come together in infinite permutations to check power anywhere it concentrates. The greatest achievement isn't in producing technology, but using it to re-define the boundaries of what is possible."

"The secret documents that I was interested in were located in this building, the British Parliament, and the data that I wanted to get my hands on were the expense receipts of members of Parliament. I thought this was a basic question to ask in a democracy. (Applause) It wasn't like I was asking for the code to a nuclear bunker, or anything like that, but the amount of resistance I got from this Freedom of Information request, you would have thought I'd asked something like this."

"I fought for about five years doing this, and it was one of many hundreds of requests that I made, not -- I didn't -- Hey, look, I didn't set out, honestly, to revolutionize the British Parliament. That was not my intention. I was just making these requests as part of research for my first book. But it ended up in this very long, protracted legal battle and there I was after five years fighting against Parliament in front of three of Britain's most eminent High Court judges waiting for their ruling about whether or not Parliament had to release this data. And I've got to tell you, I wasn't that hopeful, because I'd seen the establishment. I thought, it always sticks together. I am out of luck. Well, guess what? I won. Hooray."

"The transparency law they'd passed earlier that applied to everybody else, they tried to keep it so it didn't apply to them. What they hadn't counted on was digitization, because that meant that all those paper receipts had been scanned in electronically, and it was very easy for somebody to just copy that entire database, put it on a disk, and then just saunter outside of Parliament, which they did, and then they shopped that disk to the highest bidder, which was the Daily Telegraph, and then, you all remember, there was weeks and weeks of revelations, everything from porn movies and bath plugs and new kitchens and mortgages that had never been paid off. The end result was six ministers resigned, the first speaker of the house in 300 years was forced to resign, a new government was elected on a mandate of transparency, 120 MPs stepped down at that election, and so far, four MPs and two lords have done jail time for fraud. So, thank you."

"I tell you that story because it wasn't unique to Britain. It was an example of a culture clash that's happening all over the world between bewigged and bestockinged officials who think that they can rule over us without very much prying from the public, and then suddenly confronted with a public who is no longer content with that arrangement, and not only not content with it, now, more often, armed with official data itself. So we are moving to this democratization of information, and I've been in this field for quite a while."

"What I've seen from being in this access to information field for so long is that it used to be quite a niche interest, and it's gone mainstream. Everybody, increasingly, around the world, wants to know about what people in power are doing. They want a say in decisions that are made in their name and with their money. It's this democratization of information that I think is an information enlightenment, and it has many of the same principles of the first Enlightenment. It's about searching for the truth, not because somebody says it's true, "because I say so." No, it's about trying to find the truth based on what you can see and what can be tested. That, in the first Enlightenment, led to questions about the right of kings, the divine right of kings to rule over people, or that women should be subordinate to men, or that the Church was the official word of God."

"I've mentioned WikiLeaks, because surely what could be more open than publishing all the material? Because that is what Julian Assange did. He wasn't content with the way the newspapers published it to be safe and legal. He threw it all out there. That did end up with vulnerable people in Afghanistan being exposed. It also meant that the Belarussian dictator was given a handy list of all the pro-democracy campaigners in that country who had spoken to the U.S. government. Is that radical openness? I say it's not, because for me, what it means, it doesn't mean abdicating power, responsibility, accountability, it's actually being a partner with power. It's about sharing responsibility, sharing accountability. Also, the fact that he threatened to sue me because I got a leak of his leaks, I thought that showed a remarkable sort of inconsistency in ideology, to be honest, as well."

"The other thing is that power is incredibly seductive, and you must have two real qualities, I think, when you come to the table, when you're dealing with power, talking about power, because of its seductive capacity. You've got to have skepticism and humility. Skepticism, because you must always be challenging. I want to see why do you -- you just say so? That's not good enough. I want to see the evidence behind why that's so. And humility because we are all human. We all make mistakes. And if you don't have skepticism and humility, then it's a really short journey to go from reformer to autocrat, and I think you only have to read "Animal Farm" to get that message about how power corrupts people."

"So what is the solution? It is, I believe, to embody within the rule of law rights to information. At the moment our rights are incredibly weak. In a lot of countries, we have Official Secrets Acts, including in Britain here. We have an Official Secrets Act with no public interest test. So that means it's a crime, people are punished, quite severely in a lot of cases, for publishing or giving away official information. Now wouldn't it be amazing, and really, this is what I want all of you to think about, if we had an Official Disclosure Act where officials were punished if they were found to have suppressed or hidden information that was in the public interest?"

"Some fairy tales have happy endings. Some don't. I think we've all read the Grimms' fairy tales, which are, indeed, very grim. But the world isn't a fairy tale, and it could be more brutal than we want to acknowledge. Equally, it could be better than we've been led to believe, but either way, we have to start seeing it exactly as it is, with all of its problems, because it's only by seeing it with all of its problems that we'll be able to fix them and live in a world in which we can all be happily ever after."

"If you ask people, ‘Do you want power?’ most will likely cringe. Especially women. That’s because our cultural view of power is conflated with domination, abuse, oppression. Unless you are a psychopath, you probably aren’t keen to meet this out on your fellow beings. Hence empathetic, caring people will shy away from taking positions of power. But actually this turning away from power is itself an abuse of power."

"The definition of power as domination is just one of many and not even the most popular or powerful form of power. In fact, that version of power is WEAK POWER. Weak because it is fragile, easily defeated, and requires constant effort to maintain usually in the form of propaganda, lies and violence. This is because weak power can’t inspire or persuade. It has no vision. It is not true power."

"There are other types of power, too. There is the power to create and grow. The power to influence outcomes and make changes. There is, as Brene Brown puts it, power to, power with, and power within. Power is relational and changing. Sometimes you might be in a situation where you hold power and in another where you don’t. Some power is deserved because you earned it and some is not because you came by it only through privilege. Power is not inherently bad or good. Power can be used to support, protect, defend and sustain life. Or it can be used to exploit, oppress, abuse and destroy life."

"When people with good intentions don't own and take power, it becomes the preserve of the heartless, ruthless, greedy, narcissistic, psychopaths. That’s why not using power can be just as bad as using it badly."

"Weak power has no vision for a world where beings are free and flourishing. It cannot conceive of a world based on pleasure, diversity and abundance, though that was life on our planet until very recently."

"Real power is the ability to imagine something better, something different and act to bring that vision to life. That’s what I want for all people. Not that we crave weak power. But that we ARE power. By our actions and our choices we re-make the world in such a way that Life and Nature are sacred once again."

"Protesting is one of our most important democratic rights. It ensures the most fair and efficient running of a country because it allows new ideas to be raised, criticisms to be vented. If you suppress all protest, societal discontent builds like a pressure cooker. Sooner or later, it’s going to blow, and in that chaos, all sorts of bad actors can try and gain power. That’s the real importance of protest. It means something for both a society and for an individual. It gives us agency when so often we can feel powerless. It is such a worthwhile thing to come together and petition for reform. In too many countries, it’s a privilege, but it should be our human right."

"It’s action, not beliefs, that matter most. Thinking is great. Thinking leads to action, but too often thinking can hijack our higher wisdom. The wisdom of the human heart. Too often we discount cruel or unjust actions because of beliefs. If an action is immoral but we want to do it anyway, or someone else wants us to do it, justifications are made. Beliefs are created about the lesser value of others."

"Does bullying feel right in your heart? Threatening people with violence? How about actual killing? Our hearts know what is right, and what is morally wrong. It’s the mind that plays tricks. It’s the mind that - without training, and given superiority over heart - leads us to do the things that make us feel small, corrupted, fearful and tight in our own skin. Propaganda exists to help us override our heart wisdom. The lies others tell us and the lies we tell ourselves can be used to justify the worst cruelty and harm."

"Violence is a moral crime not just against others but against one’s own heart. And we can only commit such crimes when we let our minds override the voice of our soul."

"With its idolising of stony-faced ‘strong men’, its fantasies of domination and control, fascism is the ideology of the insecure man. A man who feels - at base - unworthy, unwanted and powerless."

"Instead of real power - the power someone has when they know they are worthy, wanted and have what it takes to handle life - the insecure man seeks domination. He doesn’t feel worthy or wanted or that people will want to be with him on his own merits, so he sees manipulation and violence as the only way to be in relationship to others. He doesn’t feel he has what it takes to deal with life, so he seeks control."

"The oppression of women is key in fascism because insecure men don’t feel they have what it takes to attract and maintain a relationship with a woman. They believe the only way to get a woman is through manipulation or force. Why would a free woman with choices and resources, choose them? In their mind, they wouldn’t, so their solution is to take away freedom, choice and resources from women. This is also the driving insecurity of patriarchy, which is a form of fascism."

"Followers of fascism also have their own ‘daddy issues’. Are they drawn to an authoritarian father figure, as replacement for their own? The fascist leader granting a simulacrum of love, acceptance and belonging to men who feel cast out from the fatherly fraternity."

"What I see now when I visit America is the juxtaposition of wild nature and sterile humanity. People boxing themselves away - in houses, cars, offices."

"They say everything is bigger in America but when you’re barreling along a 10-lane highway with massive trucks on either side of you and an aggressive SUV shoving your rear, it’s hard not to feel insignificant in a hostile universe. The only sensible solution seems to be to supersize yourself so you don’t get run over. It’s as if insignificance was the design brief for so much of American architecture and infrastructure. It ignores the reality of human size, let alone vulnerability, preferring an egoic delusion that humans are separate and superior to nature. But this feeling of insignificance leads to an insatiable hunger. For a bigger vehicle, a bigger house, more money, more guns - anything to feel more secure, and that security never materializes."

"A brutal work culture adds to the feeling, pushing people toward transience. Jobs have primary importance not just for a necessary salary but to get health insurance."

"I would feel homesick for Federal Way, Washington where I grew up. A city both exuberant with nature but also nature’s destruction: virgin forests giving way to freeways, streams filled in to build strip malls, dams destroying ancient salmon spawning grounds."

"To solve our current dependence on fossil fuels is a complex problem that demands communication and cooperation. Taking binary stands and publicly shaming people, doesn’t seem a good way to solve this problem."

"Two things signal to me when a group is more interested in self-righteousness than making actual policy: Picking on allies and name calling."

"This moral superiority reveals something important. This group isn’t dealing with reality, which is nuanced and interdependent, but with absolutes. And they aren’t interested in compromise or solutions, but moral purity. Their idea of moral purity. You can share the same overall goal - be that an end to fossil fuels, sexism, racism, capitalism, you name it - but these groups demand fealty to their language and their specific interpretation of the problem. They aren’t interested in any views other than their own. You know what that sounds like? Totalitarianism."

"I used to be suspicious of happiness. It’s not that I yearned to be unhappy, but too often the quest for happiness was, to my mind, tied up with delusional thinking. It involved putting on blinkers, so the darker, sadder, more disturbing aspects of reality were blanked out. I’ve always had a ravenous curiosity for truth. I want to understand life and get to its essence, so putting on blinkers was not for me."

"As a newspaper reporter, I covered crime, then politics then investigations. None could be described as abundant with happiness. Yet I didn’t feel unhappy reporting on these realities. They were truths that needed to be told. Truth needs to be told regardless of how it makes people feel, and more often than not it makes people feel bad before it makes them feel good. It’s crucial to get through that initial pain, because only by doing so, and seeing reality as it is, can we learn and change."

"One of the big breakthroughs came when I started gardening. Nature is always the best teacher. It IS the universe. It IS life/death/rebirth. Trees fall, plants die, but all the time they’re also being reborn. I can’t help but notice the universe has provided all the conditions for life not just to survive but to thrive."

"In elementary school, I loved Show and Tell. I loved to hunt around my house for an object I could bring to school with a story. It’s not hard to see why I was drawn to journalism - being a reporter is the grown-up version of Show and Tell. I also loved to show off and perform bike and roller-skating stunts. Yet somewhere along the way I lost the joy of being seen. Instead, starting in my teenage years, the desire came coupled with shame, dread, anxiety, embarrassment, even outright mortification. I don’t think I’m unusual in this, especially among women."

"The need to be seen is fundamental to all humans. In healthy development, a child gets appropriate amounts of attention and recognition, which leads to a secure sense of self worth. If we are also accepted in our fullness then we’ve hit the developmental jackpot and become superbly well-adjusted adults. But many of us didn’t get that level of attention, attunement or acceptance. In my own case, I was left with a hunger and yearning to be known and valued."

"Suddenly other people thought me admirable and important. When they did, I felt good. But also nervous because what if they suddenly changed their mind? I could see other famous people fall from the public’s favour, admiration turning to envy or hatred. People wrote admiring letters to me, but I couldn’t take it in because I thought ‘they don’t really know me’. They only knew the version of me I put on display - that of the tough tenacious reporter, battling for the people’s right to know. They didn’t know my aching emptiness, my deep hunger to be known. I learned that being seen is not the same as being known. Outsourcing my self-worth to total strangers, I realised, was not a good idea."

"What to do? In therapy there’s a saying that ‘the way through is in’. Instead of avoiding pain, go through it. My investigative mindset liked this and so I decided to investigate myself. I started therapy and also began writing more creatively. It’s how I wrote as a child until shame cloaked my ability to be seen."

"Why do women go around feeling so embarrassed of ourselves? Why do we wind up feeling we have to be perfect, or pure, pretty or agreeable just to gain a modicum of acceptance? I think it’s because that’s actually the fact of being a woman in a patriarchal society."

"So shame can help protect us, but it can also become a prison. It precludes change. As long as we remain invisible, as long as we dim our light, or hide behind a persona, we curtail our ability to be truly known by others and form meaningful connections."

"Flying from Gatwick Airport recently, I noticed the absolute dearth of water fountains. I found just one in the terminal and it was hiding in a bathroom. If there are more, they’re not easily located. It’s only slightly better at Heathrow unless you happen to be a member of a private lounge (which since British Airways changed their loyalty program I no longer am). The single best way to avoid plastic pollution is for people to use their own water bottles and plenty of people had them. There were many of us hunting around the airport for a place to fill them. Why the lack? We live in a wet country where water is plentiful. When I go to America there are (and have been for decades) fountains everywhere. Yet most British airports have a distinct lack of water fountains."

"On tropical beaches from Ghana to the Caribbean and Indonesia, the most common detritus I’ve seen is the plastic water bottle. We in the West really have no excuse to continue to buy water in plastic bottles when it is a readily available resource. It’s how we know most eco-preservation chat is rhetoric rather than reality. What matters most is money not nature. Pure greed. We all fall prey to this - preferring to pay over the odds to each buy our own bottle of water from a private company rather than agreeing to collectively pay for a water fountain."

"I was being seen, yes, but fame is outsourcing your own worth onto strangers. It doesn’t solve the root problem of feeling unworthy or unloved. Nor does it do anything to heal the pain from such a feeling. Fame, money, power - they promise, or give the illusion of, being the solution to life’s pains, but in reality they are hollow. At best, they offer short-term, superficial relief from pain, but at worst they isolate a person so thoroughly they became incapable of happiness or living a meaningful life."

"Look at anyone who uses money, fame or power to fill their inner voids, and you’ll see someone in a clear addiction cycle. They can’t live without their next fix. The next headline, the next million, the next power grab."

"First, what makes a bad airport: Too few seats and a dearth of facilities apart from the inevitable duty free that you always find, no matter how dire the airport, snaking for miles, standing between airport security and your departure gates like an obstacle course that reeks of perfume. I hate these modern duty free shops that have come to infest all modern airports. Why is that? Are they all run by the same company and has that company got a monopoly on all the world’s airports? Or our airport managers so lacking in imagination they can’t imagine an airport without this mecca to materialism? If an alien came down to earth what would they make of the human race with our seeming obsession with alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate from the same multinational companies, cosmetics and perfume? The only good thing in them is the one shelf spotlighting local delicacies, but these are always massively overpriced and you can get much better quality and variety in the town itself."

"Writing - at least for me - requires quiet, stability, stillness. Some might say boredom. How to write about life when you’re too busy living it? Life fills my cup and then I need time and space to distill what’s in the cup into its essence. The challenge is to live a full, adventurous life while also finding time and space to write about it. If there’s no time or space to reflect, then what I write is just hot takes and first impressions. That’s the sort of writing I did as a reporter, but here I want to make broader sense of what I’ve experienced. Boil all those experiences of being alive into some kind of meaning."

"When death is not witnessed in its physical reality, it lives only in our imagination. I think this is one reason we fear death so much more in the West than in cultures where dead bodies are an everyday part of life. When we can see the physical dimension of death, its mystery is lessened. We can see that in death there is also a lot of peace. When death exists only in our imagination or in crime drama re-creations, it is limitless and frightening."

"It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest."

"By making everything secure [governments] have degraded the quality of secrecy."

"Journalists are, or ought to be, the public's hired guns sent out to collect information, question it, verify it and distil it to what is important and true. This takes time and skill, and is the only thing a journalist does that marks him or her out as a professional. It's also the reason why anyone would choose well-known newspaper's website over an unknown blog."

"The survival of journalism in the digital age rests on its unique selling point: serving this public interest. Fail or forget to do that, and it has no future."

"If you believe the promise that an authoritarian state makes that if it has enough knowledge on every citizen it will keep people safe. I think that’s a false promise. It doesn’t actually happen. If that was the case then East Germany would be a really incredible place to live and in fact it wasn’t, it was really horrible, most of these places were really horrible."

"I’m talking of the revolutionary quality of digitization. And I say it’s revolutionary because once information is no longer a bunch of box files or papers in a filing cabinet but just bits that fly through the air, it means that it’s so hard for people in power to control it. And it’s always been true that knowledge is power. And so once it becomes very difficult for people in power to keep hold of information it means that it becomes very hard for them to keep hold of power, because power just flows out. The default now is zero cost for information to spread instantly around the globe. And in fact you have to pay money to stop it now. That’s incredibly disruptive and revolutionary."

"The first thing is that you’re always at a disadvantage, because a bureaucracy is funded by the public to have permanent people there who can relentlessly advocate for their own interest. And that’s the problem: when bureaucracy stops working for the public interest."

"What’s really important is to have systemic changes. By that I mean, for example, putting into law that people have a right to access official information. Once freedom of information becomes part of the bureaucracy, the bureaucrats who are freedom of information officials have a vested interest in making sure that that law is there and that it actually works, because it kind of justifies their existence. One thing is to institutionalize rights to know."

"There doesn’t seem to be any law that’s there to protect the citizens from massive State surveillance. We have to collectively come up with some fundamental values around people’s right to privacy, the right to be left alone from government, and rights to free speech."

"We’ve come up with ways to judge the quality of a product. The thing is that we’re just getting used to the idea that information is a product, and we have to come up with criteria on which to judge which information is worth paying attention to and taking seriously and which isn’t. So we have to think: is this information new? Is it relevant? Is it trustworthy? Can I verify it? Who’s the source? If you’re a journalist you’re used to doing this as your job, but that’s going to become increasingly necessary for people online, because they just get hit with so much information, and if they don’t want to just sit there, manipulated by all different kinds of propaganda, they have to start getting tooled up on how to be a savvy information consumer."

"The problem with WikiLeaks is that it’s been taken over by Julian Assange, and that is directly opposed to what the whole movement is meant to be about: decentralized power, collaboration, equality and transparency. Under Julian Assange, WikiLeaks has become exactly the opposite of all of these things: it’s become totally centralized, it’s become a hierarchy, it’s not transparent. And it’s not collaborative, but incredibly divisive in the transparency community, because anybody who dares to challenge or criticize Julian comes under severe fire from him. A person who’s meant to be a leader of a movement, which is what he claims to be, you’re meant to be about building and accruing allies, rather than going into the movement and being divisive. But that’s exactly what he’s been."

"The movement of radical transparency and accountability is not about putting a new person in charge, it’s about getting rid of the whole idea of hierarchal politics. It’s about decentralizing power."

"A lack of government oversight hasn't hindered the internet. Quite the opposite. A hands-off approach is largely responsible for its fantastic growth and success. The tremendous innovation and economic boon produced by the free internet should be proof enough that the dead hand of government isn't needed."

"This is the information war we are now engaged in. Governments are seeking to militarise cyberspace while citizens fight for the right to communicate and assemble freely online without state surveillance."

"We need to codify our values and build consensus around what we want from a free society and a free internet. We need to put into law protections for our privacy and our right to speak and assemble."

"To be successful, a campaign to maintain the free internet and freedom of information has to go beyond vandal hackers. Stunts designed not to provoke dialogue or persuade the public of the rightness of the cause but simply to throw up a middle finger to authority are more hindrance than help."

"The public pay for and elect the government and it is only by the people’s will that those in public office hold power. Public servants’ primary responsibility is to serve the people and we have a right to know what they are doing in our name and with our money. Public accountability does not end the day after an election."

"Transparency is seen as the antidote to corruption because secrecy is, if not its cause, then at least a necessary precondition. This is especially so for corruption involving private enrichment from public goods. Transparency is a power-reducing mechanism so it matters whose affairs are made transparent and for what purpose."

"Transparency can help citizens hold the powerful to account; but it can also be used by the powerful to control citizens by making their lives transparent through surveillance. For transparency to be just, it must always be considered in relationship to power."

"Transparency helps ensure that power is not abused or used to make the powerful, or their immediate families, rich. There is also a genuine public interest in ensuring that the people who make laws and levy tax are following those laws and paying their fair share of tax."

"This is the problem with the argument that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear: it ignores the issue of power. If we are not careful, transparency can be used to increase, rather than reduce, the information asymmetry between ruler and ruled."

"Transparency strengthens democracy only when it gives citizens information they can use. It is not just about politicians telling us what they want us to know. For it to mean anything, it must empower citizens and provide answers to the questions they ask, not merely spoon feed them meagre information rations."

"I get it. It is always easier to go after the person raising a problem than to deal with the problem itself, especially if that problem is systemic."

"One of the things that struck me most noticeably when moving to the UK from the US in 1997 was the secrecy of the state toward its citizens. Having worked as a crime reporter in America, I discovered that most of the public records and information I used to do my job were actually illegal to access in the UK. I found the secrecy wasn’t unique to law enforcement but rather a default attitude among officials. It didn’t matter if I were asking for details of food hygiene inspections, parliamentary expenses or police reports, the attitude was the same. A kind of disbelief and then a patronising disdain, by which I was meant to understand that it was not my “place” as a mere citizen — or subject as I learnt was the UK term — to ask for a full accounting from agents of the state."

"I was putting together a book, Your Right to Know, about people’s new rights under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) 2000 that was coming into force in 2005. I thought it would be a game-changer for British democracy and I wanted to include contact details for the new FOI units in public agencies. I was used to naming public officials. In America it was no big deal; anonymity was only used if there was a valid reason. But you would have thought I’d asked for nuclear codes such was the shock and pushback I received to this simple request. The idea of providing actual names was anathema and I began to wonder who was the master here, and who the servant."

"Secrecy, in the hands of the powerful, is too easy a tool to abuse. The distance from protection to cover-up is short, and a tool initially intended to help can quickly morph into causing harm. That’s why it should never be a default for anyone in power, but rather an exception."

"What I call the ‘information war’, where through the control of information our society is being radically transformed."

"The point about digitization, just to explain what I mean by that, is the way that information is no longer a physical commodity. It doesn't have a mass like it used to. So it used to be that if you wanted to leak a bunch of documents, you physically had to carry away these huge boxes of documents and then you had to physically photocopy them somehow. And they had this physical mass, and it was through that mass that they could be controlled by people in power. When information is digitized, it loses that mass for the most part. It becomes almost ephemeral, it's like an idea; it's like a thought. And it spreads and it can be shared almost instantaneously. So you can take that, and then you combine it with the internet, which is this web in which everybody is talking to each other and sharing information. And you've got the makings of what I think is a digital revolution, which nobody quite knows how to handle it, what to do with it."

"In the same way that in freedom of information around the world, the onus is always… the balance is always on disclosure and the state has to argue why it keeps things secret. But the problem always is in enforcement and who enforces it. And it becomes particularly problematic in the intelligence agencies. Because there you've got this argument of national security and what is happening is that national security is becoming the new word of God, where you can't challenge it. You can't challenge the facts behind why we go to war or why have we put people in prison or why have we occupied a country. And that's where I do kind of think that we need to push the line further."

"I want to put paid to this idea that if you've nothing to fear, you've nothing to hide. I interviewed a really interesting guy in this book. He ran the data campaign for the Obama election, when Obama was being elected. And what they do is they just harvest huge troves of databases. And they're doing it for the basis of trying to predict who might vote for Obama in the election. And he just took me through this whole data business – data brokerage, data dealing. And he showed me this 10,000... well, it was a 464 page dictionary, a data dictionary, with 10,000 data units in it. So that's for every person, it's 10,000 things that you could find out about that person. Their political association, if they drink Coke or Diet Coke, what sort of magazines do they subscribe to, have they ever had any court cases against them. It's just like a raft of stuff. The problem is, is how these things are used. It's fine if somebody wants to sell you some products, but increasingly states are accessing all this information. And they're building algorithms to try and predict criminals. … It's pretty well-known that the National Security Agency in America is building algorithms and it's taking all of these datasets and basically trying to predict who is going to be a problem for us in future. And to me that just seems an incredibly dangerous road for us to go down, that you’re no longer innocent until proven guilty. We’re starting to imagine or predict who is going to be a problem."

"I think with all technology, people have an idea of how it will be used, but then it has a life of its own and people use it in all kinds of ways. In the same way with Facebook. I doubt when people first created Facebook they imagined it was going to help people in Egypt overthrow a dictator. So it does have a life of its own that we can’t predict."

"I’m very much a free market capitalist, actually. I don’t agree with a kind of totalitarian, one government or sort of universal law. I think what will happen and what is happening now is, in the same way as… In the way that countries make themselves attractive to investors through different pieces of legislation they offer, whether it’s secrecy in the case of the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, I think the fact that some countries now are offering very robust publishing laws, it will be that as information is global, what you might see is that these big internet companies like Google or Facebook, that have their servers, will start to relocate those servers to countries where they have less interference. In a way, you’re creating a kind of free market of freedom of information law."

"The main thing, if there is a power that the media has, it’s mostly because they represent the public in quite a direct relationship. They’re very populist in the sense that they are meant to be the public’s hired goons who go out, find information, collate it all, verify whether or not it’s true, and then signpost to the citizens that this is worth reading. And they make it in such a way that it’s interesting to read. So they are kind of spokespeople for the people. And in an interconnected age, they are definitely quicker to realize the way power has shifted. You find most journalists now are on all these social networks. They’re all about creating… they want a direct relationship with their audience, in a way that politicians have been very loathe to do."

"You find most journalists now are on all these social networks. They’re all about creating… they want a direct relationship with their audience, in a way that politicians have been very loathe to do. They don’t want to come down to the masses. They still want to be in that fortress, in that ivory tower where they can lecture down to people. They haven’t really adapted to this two-way communication."

"What I say in the book is that rather than it being the death of journalism, this whole deluge of information, it to me marks a time when journalism can really come into its own, because as we’re drowning in information, the whole point of a journalist is to signpost what’s important and then to verify whether or not it’s true."

"This is where we get into the information war - that speculative blood became more important than the actual blood. We already can see all that terrible stuff – we know about that. Let's focus on your nightmares, how all these people might die because the government's secrets have been unleashed."

"It was that whole Wizard of Oz moment. We all look at these politicians – oh wow, they're so powerful - and then it was the little dog pulling the curtain away."

"The American government said: 'You can't publish this, it's dangerous, it's going to damage world affairs, diplomacy, etc, and then you publish it anyway and it's for the greater good, telling people what they needed to know."

"Obviously, the health benefits of being vegan are written in stone but I honestly believe the most benefit to me being vegan is that I do not carry the burden of guilt that I would have to endure knowing that I abused others for my own 'benefit'. … Veganism is everything to me. It touches every part of my life. It is my life. I could not begin to imagine living my life any other way. … Often people think we are weak in body and mind. They mistake our compassion for weakness. … My strengths as an athlete are that I am not an athlete for myself. I am doing it for the benefit of others, which makes me work much harder to achieve. I am not selfish enough to want something this badly for myself. It makes me push myself that bit harder knowing that by doing well I can possibly convince others to consider a vegan lifestyle."

"At the entrance to Shrehi, one of the villages attacked by ISIS in July, we stopped the car to visit the poster that had been erected with the names of the martyrs killed during the attack. Young men, women, children, murdered by a terrorist group with a history of collusion with the US Coalition against Syria and the Syrian Arab Army."

"[Beeley] began attacking the White Helmets vehemently. In 2015, she had called for the first responders to be killed, even though "violence to life and person [against civilians and non-combatants], in particular murder of all kinds" is prohibited by the Geneva Convention. "White Helmets are not getting it," she tweeted. "We know they are terrorists. Makes them a legit target." Beeley has admitted, in a private Facebook conversation with the blogger Scott Gaulke that was obtained by hackers and subsequently published, that even Assad does not deny torture. She wrote, "even Govt members dont [sic] deny it btw," adding that she would never admit this publicly."

"Beeley’s Twitter account is routinely referenced by Russian government social media accounts. She has a significant platform through Russian state media, her blogs have been cited in defence of Assad's atrocities by the Russian government, she has held meetings with the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakhorova, and has been endorsed by far-right agitators Katie Hopkins and Nick Griffin – as well as written up by Infowars."

"Beeley has justified the use of incendiary weapons against civilians, recycled and championed debunked conspiracy theories, and described a meeting with Assad as her proudest moment. This is cheerleading, not reporting."

"Assad’s very own Alex Jones."

"For allegations against the rebels, Beeley’s threshhold of proof is so low that it’s almost non-existent. For allegations against the regime it’s so high that it may never be reached."

"What's really concerning is the spread of these incidents. They're coming in from right across the country. Secondly, some of them are quite aggressive very focused, very aggressive attacks. And thirdly, there also seems to be significant online activity... suggesting co-ordination of incidents and attacks against institutions or places where Muslims congregate."

"You can't stop people having places of worship. That, in itself, is discriminatory. Democracy and Islam can live together. It's not Islam that's the problem, it's extreme elements within the Muslim community. Those elements develop because vulnerable young men come to believe inspirational leaders with extreme views."

"[I]n the wake of the growth of the animal-rights movement, there has recently arisen a hitherto unfelt need to demonise and demean our non-human victims - and those who try to help them - now that our previously well-nigh unquestioned right to kill and exploit them is being challenged. Bloodsports enthusiasts, for instance, currently spend a lot of time cataloguing the alleged depredations of our victims on the environment. Recreational animal-killers go to extraordinarily lengths to avoid admitting that they themselves enjoy hunting and killing other creatures for fun. But then until a few years ago such rationalisations seemed scarcely called for. Selfish DNA had honed our intuitions so that the most agonising bloodshed seemed simply "natural"."

"Nature documentaries are mostly travesties of real life. They entertain and edify us with evocative mood-music and travelogue-style voice-overs. They impose significance and narrative structure on life's messiness. Wildlife shows have their sad moments, for sure. Yet suffering never lasts very long. It is always offset by homely platitudes about the balance of Nature, the good of the herd, and a sort of poor-man's secular theodicy on behalf of Mother Nature which reassures us that it's not so bad after all. That's a convenient lie. If you had just gone through the horror of seeing your loved one eaten alive by a predator, or die slowly of thirst, you would find such clichés empty. Yet in Nature this kind of thing happens all the time. It's completely endemic to the prevailing red-in-tooth-and-claw Darwinian regime. Lions kill their targets primarily by suffocation; which will last minutes. The wolf pack may start eating their prey while the victim is still conscious, though hamstrung. Sharks and the orca basically eat their prey alive; but in sections for the larger prey, notably seals. An analogous scenario in which intelligent extraterrestrial naturalists turned the stylised portrayal of our death-agonies into a lyrical spectacle for popular home entertainment is repugnant. Yet as long as we revel in the production of animal snuff-movies in the guise of wildlife documentaries, that is often the role we play in the tragic lives of photogenic members of other species here on earth."

"By far my greatest dread in life […] is that (some variant of) the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true."

"[T]here is no fundamental biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow everyone to be "in" love with everyone else - if we should so choose. But simply loving each other will be miraculous enough; and will probably suffice. An empty religious piety can be transformed into a biological reality."

"When Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will try to secure permission for him and his mother to visit the Other Place, John is initially pleased and excited. Echoing Miranda in The Tempest, he exclaims: "O brave new world that has such people in it." Heavy irony. Like innocent Miranda, he is eager to embrace a way of life he neither knows nor understands. And of course he comes unstuck. Yet if we swallow such fancy literary conceits, then ultimately the joke is on us. It is only funny in the sense there are "jokes" about Auschwitz. For it is Huxley who neither knows nor understands the glory of what lies ahead. A utopian society in which we are sublimely happy will be far better than we can presently imagine, not worse. And it is we, trapped in the emotional squalor of late-Darwinian antiquity, who neither know nor understand the lives of the god-like super-beings we are destined to become."

"I argue that what breathes fire into the QM equations is field-theoretic what-it's-likeness: "microqualia" to use a philosopher's term of art. The different values of the solutions to the ultimate physical equations exhaustively yield the abundance of different values of subjectivity. There is no room for dualism; "nomological danglers"; causally inert epiphenomena; classical, porridge-like lumps of otherwise insentient but magically mind-secreting matter, etc. There is no "explanatory gap" because there aren't any material objects - not even brains or nerve cells as commonly (mis)perceived. Instead, over millions of years, non-equilibrium thermodynamics and universal, (neo-)Darwinian principles of natural selection have contrived to organise a minimal and self-intimating subjective sludge of microqualia into complex functional living units. Initially, these units have taken the form of self-replicating, information-bearing biomolecular patterns. Eventually, selection-pressure has given rise to complex minds as well, albeit as just one part of the throwaway host vehicles by which our genes leave copies of themselves. Conscious mind, on this proposal, is a triumph of organisation: our egocentric virtual worlds are warm and gappy QM-coherent states of consciousness. Contra materialist metaphysics, sentience of any kind is not the daily re-enactment of an ontological miracle. Moreover the idea that what-it's-like-ness is the fire in the equations is (at least) consistent with orthodox relativistic quantum field theory - because the theorists' key notions (e.g. that of a field, string, brane, etc) are defined purely mathematically. In other cases, they readily lend themselves to such a reconstruction. Using the word "physical" doesn't add anything of substance."

"As the neurobiological basis of feeling and emotion is unravelled, and the human genome decoded and rewritten, it will become purely an issue of post-human decision whether negative modes of consciousness are generated in any form or texture whatsoever."

"The negative utilitarian might reply that this formulation of the problem is misleading. We do not live in a notional world where only a pinprick, minor pains, or even just "mild" suffering exists. In the real world, frightful horrors as well as humdrum malaise occur every day. The intensity of suffering is sometimes so dreadful that its victims are prepared to destroy themselves to bring their torment to an end. Each year, some 800,000 people across the planet kill themselves while in the grip of suicidal despair. Tens of millions of people are severely depressed or suffer chronic neuropathic pain. By way of contrast, the genteel conventions of an ethics seminar in academic philosophy, or the scholarly technicalities of a journal article, simply fail to come to terms with the enormity of what's at stake. To talk of a "pinprick" is to trivialise the NU ethical stance."

"[U]nlike positive utilitarianism or so-called preference utilitarianism - neither of which can ever be wholly fulfilled - [negative utilitarianism] seems achievable in full."

"[N]othing is too terrible to be true if it is consistent with the laws of nature [...]."

"A lot of people recoil from the word "drugs" - which is understandable given today's noxious street drugs and their uninspiring medical counterparts. Yet even academics and intellectuals in our society typically take the prototypical dumb drug, ethyl alcohol. If it's socially acceptable to take a drug that makes you temporarily happy and stupid, then why not rationally design drugs to make people perpetually happier and smarter? Presumably, in order to limit abuse-potential, one would want any ideal pleasure drug to be akin - in one limited but important sense - to nicotine, where the smoker's brain finely calibrates its optimal level: there is no uncontrolled dose-escalation."

"Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn't it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?"

"It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings."

"When one is gripped by excruciating physical pain, one is always shocked at just how frightful it can be."

"If we want eternal life, then we’ll need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like. “May all that have life be delivered from suffering”, said Gautama Buddha. It’s a wonderful sentiment. Sadly, only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the living world. Compassion alone is not enough."

"My own sense of how to behave in a simulation has more traditional roots in the theory of perception. I've long believed that each of us lives in an egocentric simulation of the world run by the mind/brain. Since the zombies of each (waking) simulation have sentient real world counterparts, one should treat them as though they were real. Nonetheless as an angst-ridden teenager, my dawning acceptance of an inferential realist theory of perception made me feel as if I'd been condemned to solitary confinement for life. The sense of loneliness was indescribable. Naïve realism is better for one's mental health."

"Assume, provisionally at any rate, a utilitarian ethic. The abolitionist project follows naturally, in "our" parochial corner of Hilbert space at least. On its completion, if not before, we should aim to develop superintelligence to maximise the well-being of the fragment of the cosmos accessible to beneficent intervention. And when we are sure – absolutely sure – that we have done literally everything we can do to eradicate suffering elsewhere, perhaps we should forget about its very existence."

"My own view of the risks and uncertainties is that there is a critical distinction between trying to abolish suffering exclusively via social reform and abolishing suffering directly via biotechnology. As we know, utopian social experiments typically go wrong, sometimes hideously wrong, and end up causing a lot of suffering instead. The abolitionist project of eradicating the biological substrates of suffering sounds like just another utopian scheme, whether it's touted as a grandiose species-project or simply as a byproduct of the Reproductive Revolution explored here. Although the abolition of psychological pain is arguably no more utopian in principle than pain-free surgery, it could presumably go wrong in unanticipated ways too. Perhaps we'll unwittingly create a fool's paradise. But if and when we ever abolish the molecular underpinning of unpleasant experience, and it becomes physiologically impossible for any sentient being to suffer, we thereby change the very meaning of what it is for anything to "go wrong". Unwelcome surprises where no one gets hurt are very different from unwelcome surprises where they do. For what it's worth, I think the abolition of involuntary suffering is the precondition of any civilised posthuman society; and therefore a risk worth taking."

"Here the question comes down to an analysis of risk-reward ratios - and our basic ethical values, themselves shaped by our evolutionary past. Lest extension of the new reproductive medicine seem too rashly experimental even to contemplate, it's worth recalling that each act of old-fashioned sexual reproduction is itself an untested genetic experiment, the outcome of random mutations and meiotic shuffling of the genetic deck, and with no happy ending to date. So just who are we to accuse of reckless gambling? As it stands, all of us are genetically predestined to grow old and die; and in the course of a lifetime, the great majority of humans will experience periods of intense psychological distress, for instance loneliness and heartache after an unhappy love affair. Our social primate biology ensures that most of us sometimes experience, to a greater or lesser degree, all manner of nasty states that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment e.g. jealousy, resentment, anger, and so forth. Hundreds of millions of people in the world today suffer bouts of depression; others live with chronic anxiety. One might say these phenotypes are part of what it means to be human. Worse, we pass a heritable predisposition to these horrible states on to our children."

"[H]ere we come to the nub of the issue: the alleged moral force of the term "natural". If any creature, by its very nature, causes terrible suffering, albeit unwittingly, is it morally wrong to change that nature? If a civilised human were to come to believe s/he had been committing acts that caused grievous pain for no good reason, then s/he would stop - and want other moral agents to prevent the recurrence of such behaviour. May we assume that the same would be true of a lion, if the lion were morally and cognitively "uplifted" so as to understand the ramifications of what (s)he was doing? Or a house cat tormenting a mouse? Or indeed a human sociopath?"

"Given our anthropocentric bias, thinking of non-human vertebrates not just as equivalent in moral status to toddlers or infants, but as though they were toddlers or infants, is a useful exercise. Such reconceptualisation helps correct our lack of empathy for sentient beings whose physical appearance is different from "us". Ethically, the practice of intelligent "anthropomorphism" shouldn't be shunned as unscientific, but embraced insofar as it augments our stunted capacity for empathy. Such anthropomorphism can be a valuable corrective to our cognitive and moral limitations. This is not a plea to be sentimental, simply for impartial benevolence."

"It is hard to imagine an experience more horrific than being eaten alive. Most of us would prefer not to imagine what it must feel like. Note that the photographer here had to persuade the park ranger to violate the park rules and put the baby elephant out of his misery. By analogy, suppose it were lawful to visit Third World countries for photoshoots but illegal to "interfere" and help a stricken human baby. Is there a fundamental difference between "ethical" intervention to help humans and "sentimental" pleas to "interfere" and help non-humans? Should we encourage the preservation of life-forms such as the hyena in their current guise? Or do the value judgements underlying the "science" of conservation biology need to be re-examined?"

"Our present-day neurochemical cocktail, we are asked to believe, is the medium through which alien realms of consciousness can be grasped and neutrally appraised from a third-person perspective. Empirical research suggests this optimism is at best naïve."

"Human intuitions are systematically biased. Evolutionary psychology explains how our moral intuitions and the rationalisations they spawn have been shaped by millennia of natural selection to maximise the inclusive fitness of our genes, not to track the welfare of other sentient beings impartially conceived. Many human cultures have found nothing intuitively wrong with aggressive warfare, slavery, wife-beating, infanticide or female genital mutilation. Ultimately, folk morality is a doomed enterprise as hopeless as folk physics. A mature posthuman ethics, I'd argue, must be committed to the well-being of all sentient life; and mature posthuman technology offers the means to deliver that commitment."

"Many city-dwellers have a romanticized conception of the living world. From another perspective, some "conservation biologists" favour e.g. "". By contrast, I think any truly compassionate person should be horrified at the terrible suffering of Nature "red in tooth and claw". Why not aim for a cruelty-free world instead?"

"From a young age, I've viewed the animals we abuse and kill as akin - functionally, intellectually and emotionally - to small children. Small children are vulnerable. Typically, they don't need "liberating". Infants and toddlers in particular need looking after. The problem - when I was a teenager - was that most of interventions I could think of to alleviate wild animal suffering might easily make things worse in the long run. Thus if we sought to rescue herbivores, then obligate carnivores (and their young) would starve. If we were to phase out carnivorous predators altogether, then there would a population explosion of "prey" species. Lots of herbivores would then starve too. The food chain seemed an inexorable fact of the world - a fact as immutable as, say, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Only after reading Eric Drexler's classic "Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology" did I gradually come to realize that there were technical solutions to all these problems - notably in vitro meat, immunocontraception, neurochips to modulate behaviour, nanobots to manage marine ecosystems, and ultimately rewriting the vertebrate genome."

"Today, empathetic intelligence entails sharing the sorrows of other sentient beings. In our posthuman future, will empathy consist entirely in sharing each other's joys?"

"A global transition to a cruelty-free vegan diet won't just help non-human animals. The transition will also help malnourished humans who could benefit from the grain currently fed to factory-farmed animals. For factory-farming is not just cruel; it's energy-inefficient. Let's take just one example. Over the past few decades, millions of Ethiopians have died of "food shortages" while Ethiopia grew grain to sell to the West to feed cattle. Western meat-eating habits prop up the price of grain so that poor people in the developing world can't afford to buy it. In consequence, they starve by the millions. In my work, I explore futuristic, hi-tech solutions to the problem of suffering. But anybody who seriously wants to reduce human and non-human suffering alike should adopt a cruelty-free vegan lifestyle today."

"Some days will be sublime. Others will be merely wonderful. But critically, there will be one particular texture ("what it feels like") of consciousness that will be missing from our lives; and that will be the texture of nastiness."

"Suffering exists only because it was good for our genes. Conditionally-activated negative emotions were fitness-enhancing in the ancestral environment. In the current era, apologists for mental pain are serving as the innocent mouthpieces of the nasty bits of code which spawned them."

"I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences."

"So what is the alternative to traditional anthropocentric ethics? Antispeciesism is not the claim that "All Animals Are Equal", or that all species are of equal value, or that a human or a pig is equivalent to a mosquito. Rather the antispeciesist claims that, other things being equal, equally strong interests should count equally. Experiences that are subjectively negative or positive in hedonic tone to the same degree must count for the same."

"[B]oth natural selection and the historical record offer powerful reasons for doubting the trustworthiness of our naive moral intuitions. So the possibility that human civilisation might be founded upon some monstrous evil should be taken seriously - even if the possibility seems transparently absurd at the time."

"[O]ne might naively suppose that a negative utilitarian would welcome human extinction. But only (trans)humans - or our potential superintelligent successors - are technically capable of phasing out the cruelties of the rest of the living world on Earth. And only (trans)humans - or rather our potential superintelligent successors - are technically capable of assuming stewardship of our entire Hubble volume."

"The biology of suffering in intelligent agents is a deep underlying source of existential risk – and one that can potentially be overcome."

"A few centuries from now, if involuntary suffering still exists in the world, the explanation for its persistence won't be that we've run out of computational resources to phase out its biological signature, but rather that rational agents – for reasons unknown – will have chosen to preserve it."

"What right have humans to impose our values on members of another race or species? The charge is seductive but misplaced. There is no anthropomorphism here, no imposition of human values on alien minds. Human and nonhuman animals are alike in an ethically critical respect. The pleasure-pain axis is universal to sentient life. No sentient being wants to be harmed – to be asphyxiated, dismembered, or eaten alive. The wishes of a terrified toddler or a fleeing zebra to flourish unmolested are not open to doubt even in the absence of the verbal capacity to say so."

"Getting rid of predation isn't a matter of moralising. A python who kills a small human child isn't morally blameworthy. Nor is a lion who hunts and kills a terrified zebra. In both cases, the victim suffers horribly. But the predator lacks the empathetic and mind-reading skills needed to understand the implications of what s/he is doing. Some humans still display a similar deficit. From the perspective of the victim, the moral status or (lack of) guilty intent of a human or nonhuman predator is irrelevant. Either way, to stand by and watch the snake asphyxiate a child would be almost as morally abhorrent as to kill the child yourself. So why turn this principle on its head with beings of comparable sentience to human infants and toddlers? With power comes complicity."

"In the long run, there is nothing to stop intelligent agents from identifying the molecular signature of experience below hedonic zero and eliminating it altogether — even in insects. Nociception is vital; pain is optional. I tentatively predict that the world's last unpleasant experience in our forward light-cone will be a precisely datable event — perhaps some micro-pain in an obscure marine invertebrate a few centuries hence."

"Suppose we encounter an advanced civilization that has engineered a happy biosphere. Population sizes are controlled by cross-species immunocontraception. Free-living herbivores lead idyllic lives in their wildlife parks. Should we urge the reintroduction of starvation, asphyxiation, disemboweling and being eaten alive by predators? Is their regime of compassionate stewardship of the biosphere best abandoned in favour of "re-wilding"? I suspect the advanced civilization would regard human pleas to restore the old Darwinian regime of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" as callous if not borderline sociopathic."

"[L]ike nonhuman animals in human factory farms, free-living nonhumans who are starving - or being disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive - cannot console themselves by chanting the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. The moral case for helping other sentient beings, regardless or race or species, does not rest on the distress their plight does (or doesn't) cause spectators."

"It's easy to support the status quo if one is not another of its victims."

"The reason for sketching what's technically feasible with the tools of synthetic biology is that only after human complicity in the persistence of suffering in the biosphere is acknowledged can we hope to have an informed socio-political debate on the morality of its perpetuation. No serious ethical discussion of free-living animal suffering can begin in the absence of recognition of human responsibility for nonhuman well-being."

"To be sure, risks abound; but no one is proposing compassionate stewardship of ecosystems by philosophers. Humans are capable of choosing our own future pain-sensitivity too; but any species-wide genomic shift in human pain tolerance will depend on the willingness of prospective parents to use preimplantation genetic screening."

"[H]uman nature as encoded in our DNA isn't immutable. Mankind's barbaric track-record to date is an unreliable guide to the future. If Homo sapiens' nastier alleles and their more sinister combinations can be silenced or edited out of the genome, and new improved code-sequences inserted instead, then the pessimists will be confounded. A major discontinuity in the development of life lies ahead. Providentially, we've learned that the DNA-driven world isn't written in God-given proprietary code it would be hubris to tamper with, but in bug-ridden open source amenable to improvement."

"... our descendants may recognize that we are the sociopathic emotional primitives in the grip of an affective psychosis. Jealousy, envy, resentment, ridicule, hate, anger, disgust, spite, contempt, schadenfreude and a whole gamut of nameless but mean-spirited states we undergo each day are a toxic legacy of our Darwinian past. More commonly, perhaps, our genetic make-up ensures we simply feel indifference to the plight of all but a handful of significant others in our lives. Right now, for instance, one knows dimly at some level that there is frightful and preventable suffering in the world. Yet most of us feel no overpowering moral urgency to do anything about it."

"[T]he existence of the mind-independent environment beyond one's world-simulation is a theoretical inference, not an empirical observation."

"Confusion of sapience with sentience can be ethically catastrophic."

"Why expect a false theory of the world, i.e. classical physics, to yield a true account of consciousness?"

"Genes and culture have co-evolved. But crudely, natural selection "designed" male human primates to hunt nonhumans and build coalitions of other male human primates in order to wage territorial wars of aggression. Nature didn't design us to become a scientific community and collaborate to overcome aging. It's difficult to imagine that any human enemy could inflict such gruesome damage on the victims as growing old. The ravages of aging strike down combatants and civilians alike. So the trillions of dollars that humans currently spend on ways to harm and kill each other ("defence") would be more fruitfully spent on defeating our common enemy. We should work together to build a "Triple S" civilisation of superlongevity, superhappiness and superintelligence."

"If we don't address the genetic causes of suffering (physical and mental) we will find ourselves in 500 years enjoying material abundance via nanotech, living in a perfect democracy, colonizing space, and still sitting around wondering "Why are we miserable so much of the time? Why can't we all just get along? Why are we not all happy?""

"Today, status quo bias runs deep. Conservation biology is an ideology masquerading as a science. Many researchers seek to extend the tenets of conservation biology to humans. By contrast, a benevolent superintelligence might view Darwinian life on Earth as an infestation of biological malware and act accordingly. The amount of suffering caused by Homo sapiens is hard to quantify. But the suffering is immense and growing daily with the spread of industrialised animal abuse."

"Humans are prone to status quo bias. So let's do a thought-experiment. Imagine we stumble across an advanced civilisation that has abolished predation, disease, famine, and all the horrors of primitive Darwinian life. The descendants of archaic lifeforms flourish unmolested in their wildlife parks – free living, but not "wild". Should we urge scrapping their regime of compassionate stewardship of the living world – and a return to asphyxiation, disembowelling and being eaten alive? Or is a happy biosphere best conserved intact?"

"I think there's an asymmetry. There's this fable of Ursula Le Guin, short story, Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. We're invited to imagine this city of delights, vast city of incredible wonderful pleasures but the existence of Omelas, this city of delights depends on the torment and abuse of a single child. The question is would you walk away from Omelas and what does walking away from Omelas entail. Now, personally I am someone who would walk away from Omelas. The world does not have an off switch, an off button and I think if one is whether a Buddhist of a negative utilitarian, or someone who believes in suffering-focused ethics, rather than to consider these theoretical apocalyptic scenarios it is more fruitful to work with secular and religious life lovers to phase out the biology of suffering in favor of gradients of intelligent wellbeing because one of the advantages of hedonic recalibration, i.e. ratcheting up hedonic set points is that it doesn't ask people to give up their existing values and preferences with complications."

"All that matters is the pleasure-pain axis. Pain and pleasure disclose the world's inbuilt metric of (dis)value. Our overriding ethical obligation is to minimise suffering. After we have reprogrammed the biosphere to wipe out experience below "hedonic zero", we should build a "triple S" civilisation based on gradients of superhuman bliss. The nature of ultimate reality baffles me. But intelligent moral agents will need to understand the multiverse if we are to grasp the nature and scope of our wider cosmological responsibilities. My working assumption is non-materialist physicalism. Formally, the world is completely described by the equation(s) of physics, presumably a relativistic analogue of the universal Schrödinger equation. Tentatively, I'm a wavefunction monist who believes we are patterns of qualia in a high-dimensional complex Hilbert space. Experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical: the "fire" in the equations. The solutions to the equations of QFT or its generalisation yield the values of qualia. What makes biological minds distinctive, in my view, isn't subjective experience per se, but rather non-psychotic binding. Phenomenal binding is what consciousness is evolutionarily "for". Without the superposition principle of QM, our minds wouldn't be able to simulate fitness-relevant patterns in the local environment. When awake, we are quantum minds running subjectively classical world-simulations. I am an inferential realist about perception. Metaphysically, I explore a zero ontology [...] the total information content of reality must be zero on pain of a miraculous creation of information ex nihilo. Epistemologically, I incline to a radical scepticism that would be sterile to articulate. Alas, the history of philosophy twinned with the principle of mediocrity suggests I burble as much nonsense as everyone else."

"In future, nerve cell responsiveness to naturally occurring endogenous opioids can be increased via receptor enrichment in the brain too. In principle, we can modulate their lifelong "overexpression", intermittently heightened (or gently diminished) by whatever kinds of personal and environmental contingencies we judge fit. Both functionally and anatomically, our reward pathways can be made "bigger and better". But intelligent emotional self-mastery will involve re-engineering the mind-brain so we derive the most intense rewards from activities we deem most lastingly worthwhile: i.e. prioritising our higher-order desires over legacy first-order appetites. Natural selection has "encephalised" our emotions to benefit our genes. Rational agents can "re-encephalise" our emotions to benefit us."

"[T]rue hedonic engineering, as distinct from mindless hedonism or reckless personal experimentation, can be profoundly good for our character. Character-building technologies can benefit utilitarians and non-utilitarians alike. Potentially, we can use a convergence of biotech, nanorobotics and information technology to gain control over our emotions and become better (post-)human beings, to cultivate the virtues, strength of character, decency, to become kinder, friendlier, more compassionate: to become the type of (post)human beings that we might aspire to be, but aren't, and biologically couldn't be, with the neural machinery of unenriched minds. Given our Darwinian biology, too many forms of admirable behaviour simply aren't rewarding enough for us to practise them consistently: our second-order desires to live better lives as better people are often feeble echoes of our baser passions."

"[A]s well as seriously – indeed exhaustively – researching everything that could conceivably go wrong, I think we should also investigate what could go right. The world is racked by suffering. The hedonic treadmill might more aptly be called a dolorous treadmill. Hundreds of millions of people are currently depressed, pain-ridden or both. Hundreds of billions of non-human animals are suffering too. If we weren't so inured to a world of pain and misery, then the biosphere would be reckoned in the throes of a global medical emergency. Thanks to breakthroughs in biotechnology, pain-thresholds, default anxiety levels, hedonic range and hedonic set-points are all now adjustable parameters in human and non-human animals alike. We are living in the final century of life on Earth in which suffering is biologically inevitable. As a society, we need an ethical debate about how much pain and misery we want to preserve and create."

"All moral tradeoffs are messy. However, on some fairly modest ethical assumptions, when a severe and irreconcilable conflict of interests occurs, then the interests of the more sentient take precedence over the less sentient. This rule of thumb holds regardless of the age, race or species of the victim."

"...it won't just be the quality and quantity of consciousness in the world that will be transformed in the post-Darwinian Transition. As (post-)humanity emerges from the neurochemical Dark Ages, enriched dopaminergic function in particular may sharpen the sheer intensity and meaningfulness of every moment of conscious existence. For a generation whose lifetimes span both modes of awareness, it will be as if they had just woken up. They will feel they had hitherto been sleep-walking through life in a twilit stupor. Thereafter their former mundane and minimal existence may be recalled only as some kind of zombified trance-state whose nature they were physiologically incapable of recognising..."

"The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event. Two hundred years ago, powerful synthetic pain-killers and surgical anesthetics were unknown. The notion that physical pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed absurd. Today most of us in the technically advanced nations take its routine absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as psychological pain, too, could ever be banished is equally counter-intuitive. The feasibility of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of social policy and ethical choice."

"Much more seriously, in those traditional eco-systems that we chose to retain, millions of non-human animals will continue periodically to starve, die horribly of thirst and disease, or even get eaten alive. This is commonly viewed as "natural" and hence basically OK. It would indeed be comforting to think that in some sense this ongoing animal holocaust doesn't matter too much. We often find it convenient to act as though the capacity to suffer were somehow inseparably bound up with linguistic ability or ratiocinative prowess. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case, and a great deal that it isn't."

"The functional regions of the brain which subserve physical agony, the "pain centres", and the mainly limbic substrates of emotion, appear in phylogenetic terms to be remarkably constant in the vertebrate line. The neural pathways involving serotonin, the periaquaductal grey matter, bradykinin, dynorphin, ATP receptors, the major opioid families, substance P etc all existed long before hominids walked the earth. Not merely is the biochemistry of suffering disturbingly similar where not effectively type-identical across a wide spectrum of vertebrate (and even some invertebrate) species. It is at least possible that members of any species whose members have more pain cells exhibiting greater synaptic density than humans sometimes suffer more atrociously than we do, whatever their notional "intelligence"."

"No amount of happiness enjoyed by some organisms can notionally justify the indescribable horrors of Auschwitz. [...] Nor can the fun and games outweigh the sporadic frightfulness of pain and despair that occurs every second of every day. For there's nothing inherently wrong with non-sentience or [...] non-existence; whereas there is something frightfully and self-intimatingly wrong with suffering."

"Negative-utilitarianism is only one particular denomination of a broad church to which the reader may well in any case not subscribe. Fortunately, the program can be defended on grounds that utilitarians of all stripes can agree on. So a defence will be mounted against critics of the theory and application of a utilitarian ethic in general. For in practice the most potent and effective means of curing unpleasantness is to ensure that a defining aspect of future states of mind is their permeation with the molecular chemistry of ecstasy: both genetically precoded and pharmacologically fine-tuned. Orthodox utilitarians will doubtless find the cornucopian abundance of bliss this strategy delivers is itself an extra source of moral value. Future generations of native ecstatics are unlikely to disagree."

"It's easy to convince oneself that things can't really be that terrible, that the horror I allude to is being overblown, that what is going on elsewhere in space-time is somehow less real than the here-and-now, or that the good in the world somehow offsets the bad. Yet however vividly one thinks one can imagine what agony, torture or suicidal despair must be like, the reality is inconceivably worse. The force of "inconceivably" is itself largely inconceivable here. Blurry images of Orwell's "Room 101" can barely even hint at what I'm talking about. Even if one's ancestral namesakes [aka "younger self"] underwent great pain, then the state-dependence of memories means that much of pain's sheer dreadfulness is semantically, cognitively and emotionally inaccessible in the here-and-now. So this manifesto's rhapsodies on the incredible joys that do indeed lie ahead tend to belie its underlying seriousness of purpose. For the biological strategy is propounded here in deadly moral earnest."

"One should be wary of assuming that we're the folk who can properly look after ourselves, whereas our descendants, if they become genetically pre-programmed ecstatics, will get trapped in robot-serviced states of infantile dependence. For it shouldn't be forgotten that exuberantly happy people also have a fierce will to survive. They love life dearly. They take on daunting challenges against seemingly impossible odds. One of the hallmarks of many endogenous depressive states, on the other hand, is so-called behavioural despair. If one learns that apparently no amount of effort can rescue one from an aversive stimulus, then one tends to sink into a lethargic stupor. This syndrome of "learned helplessness" may persist even when the opportunity to escape from the nasty stimulus subsequently arises."

"Taking the abolitionist project to the rest of the galaxy and beyond sounds crazy today; but it's the application of technology to a very homely moral precept writ large, not the outgrowth of a revolutionary new ethical theory. So long as sentient beings suffer extraordinary unpleasantness - whether on Earth or perhaps elsewhere - there is a presumptive case to eradicate such suffering wherever it is found."

"Any plea ... for institutionalized risk-assessment, beefed-up bioethics panels, academic review bodies, worse-case scenario planning, more intensive computer simulations, systematic long-term planning and the institutionalized study of existential risks is admirable. But so is urgent action to combat the global pandemic of suffering. "The easiest pain to bear is someone else's"."

"There are days when you wish things could be different, but ultimately I can’t not do feminism and I don’t want to live with inequality, so I can’t really regret it. I think what happened to me was a bit of a wake-up call for society at large, it was a pretty high price I had to pay but it wasn’t completely pointless because [abuse is] something that we now talk about and we’re trying to figure out."

"We're used to the idea that women aren't represented in our culture and media and politics and films. The idea that this extended to what was sold as objective - the idea of medicine and science, that they were also underrepresenting women - was just mind-blowing to me."

"I found it very shocking and worrying in one study that looked at male and female cells and exposed them both to estrogen and to a virus. The female cell was able to use the estrogen to fight off the virus, and the male cell wasn’t able to use the estrogen and the virus took over. That was so tantalizing and also so infuriating because the vast majority of human cell studies are still done on male cells. When you look at a study like that, you can’t help thinking about how many more treatments we have ruled out at the cell stage because we only tested it on male cells."

"One of the big problems with the way we’ve laid out cities is that they’ve been laid out in such a way to serve the needs of this mythical male breadwinner who has a wife home in the suburbs…And it’s completely untrue to how women and people live their lives. They’ve got to take kids to the doctor, to school, get groceries, check in on a relative …all the things we are doing on a daily basis requires a lot of complicated logistics."

"The Golden Rule must be applied in our relations with the animal world, just as it must be applied in our relations with our fellow men, and no one can be a Christian man or woman until this finds embodiment in his or her life."

"The whole field of experiments is not only saturated with suffering, but it is dogged with failure of results and vain and ceaseless repetition of experiments over and over again."

"There is no question that vivisection is, in many cases, inseparable from suffering and that suffering is inevitable to the pursuit of the practice; further, that the suffering which is caused is altogether a minor matter to some of the men who cause it. This the public has yet to realize. It has to understand that in assenting to and encouraging experiments on living animals it is giving its consent to possibilities of illimitable suffering."

"Every time we eat, we have the power to radically transform the world we live in and simultaneously contribute to addressing many of the most pressing issues that our species currently faces: climate change, infectious disease, chronic disease, human exploitation and, of course, non-human exploitation. Every single day, our choices can help alleviate all of these problems or they can perpetuate them."

"We have created a form of tyranny over the natural world, pillaging, extracting, using and destroying as we please. We have placed ourselves above the ecological life support systems that our species depends on for survival and exploited them for our own short-term benefit, cutting down forests and polluting rivers and oceans. We have destroyed millions of years of evolution in the blink of an eye, quite literally bulldozing our way around this finite planet. For all of our intelligence, we have still failed to grasp the simple reality that we need the planet more than the planet needs us."

"People often call vegans extremists, and yet veganism is merely living by the principle that if I am against cruelty then I will do what I can to avoid perpetuating systems that cause physical and mental harm to animals. It is a clear indictment of how ingrained our state of cognitive dissonance is that we see attempts at moral consistency as signs of extremism. Is it not strange that we call those who kill dogs animal abusers, those who kill pigs normal and those who kill neither extremists? Is it not odd that someone who smashes a car window to rescue a dog on a hot day is viewed as a hero but someone who rescues a piglet suffering on a farm is a criminal?"

"It is ironic that we often believe that empathy and complex emotions only really exist in humans but we then fail to empathise with the animals who suffer at our hands."

"Veganism will come about as a result of the traits in humans that we are most proud of – ingenuity, intellectual honesty, progressiveness and self-reflection – while rejecting many of the traits that are most damaging – stubbornness, wilful ignorance, violence, selfishness and apathy. We are already seeing this in action, and though getting accurate population statistics is challenging, a clear theme is being revealed by polling and surveys: veganism is growing."

"The butcher's knife hath laid low the delight of a fond dam, & the darling of Nature is now stretched in gore upon the ground."

"Fatigued with answering the enquiries, and replying to the objections of his friends, with respect to the singularity of his mode of life, the Author of this performance conceived that he might consult his ease by making, once for all, a public apology for his opinions. Those who despise the weakness of his arguments will nevertheless learn to admit the innocence of his tenets, and suffer him to pursue, without molestation, a system of life that is more the result of sentiment than of reason, in a man who imagines that the human race were not made to live scientifically, but according to nature."

"The Author is very far from entertaining a presumption that his slender labours (crude and imperfect as they are now hurried to the press) will ever operate an effect on the public mind—and yet, when he considers the natural bias of the human heart to the side of mercy, and observes on all hands the barbarous governments of Europe giving way to a better system of things, he is inclined to hope that the day is beginning to approach when the growing sentiment of peace and good-will towards men will also embrace, in a wide circle of benevolence, the lower orders of life."

"At all events, the pleasing persuasion that his work may have contributed to mitigate the ferocities of prejudice, and to diminish in some degree the great mass of misery which oppresses the animal world, will in the hour of distress convey to the Author's heart a consolation which the tooth of calumny will not be able to impoison."

"But here the sons of science sport with the sentiments of mercy; and why, with a malicious grin, demands the modern sophist, why then is man furnished with the canine, or dog-teeth, except that nature meant him carnivorous?—Fallacious argument! Is the fitness of an action to be determined purely by the physical capacity of the agent? Because nature, kindly provident, has bestowed upon us a superabundance of animal vigour, does it follow that we ought to abuse, by habitual exertions, an excess of force, evidently granted to guard our existence on occasions of dire distress? In cases of extreme famine we destroy and devour each other; but from thence will any one pretend to prove, that man was made to feed upon his fellow men?"

"But far other is the fate of animals: for, alas! when they are plucked from the tree of Life, suddenly the withered blossoms of their beauty shrink to the chilly hand of Death. Quenched in his cold cold grasp expires the lamp of their loveliness, and struck by the livid blast of loathed putrefaction, their comely limbs are involved in ghastly horror. Shall we leave the living herbs to seek, in the den of death, an obscene aliment?—Insensible to the blooming beauties of Pomona, unallured by the fragrant fume that exhale from her groves of golden fruits, unmoved by the nectar of Nature, by the ambrosia of innocence, shall the voracious vultures of our impure appetite speed across the lovely scenes and alight in the loathsome sink of putrefaction to devour the funeral of other creatures, to load with cadaverous rottenness, a wretched stomach?"

"Ye sons of modern science, who court not wisdom in her walks of silent meditation in the grove, who behold her not in the living loveliness of her works, but expect to meet her in the midst of obscenity and corruption; ye who dig for knowledge in the depth of the dunghill, and who hope to discover wisdom enthroned amid the fragments of mortality, and the abhorrence of the senses; ye that with ruffian violence interrogate trembling nature, who plunge into her maternal bosom the butcher knife, and, in quest of your nefarious science, the fibres of agonizing animals, delight to scrutinize; ye dare also to violate the human form august; and, holding up the entrails of man, ye exclaim: behold the bowels of a carnivorous animal!—Barbarians! to these very bowels I appeal against your cruel dogmas; to these bowels, fraught with mercy, and entwined with compassion; to these bowels which nature hath sanctified to the sentiments of pity and of gratitude; to the yearnings of kindred, to the melting tenderness of love!"

"And, indeed, has not nature given, to almost every creature, the same spontaneous signs of the various affections? Admire we not in other animals whatever is most eloquent in man, the tremor of desire, the tear of distress, the piercing cry of anguish, the pity-pleading look, expressions that speak the soul with a feeling which words are feeble to convey?"

"Disgusted with continual scenes of slaughter and desolation, pierced by the incessant shrieks of suffering innocence, and, shocked by the shouts of persecuting brutality, the humane mind averts abhorrent from the view, and, turning her eyes to Hindostan, dwells with heart-felt consolation on the happy spot, where mercy protects with her right hand the streams of life, and every animal is allowed to enjoy in peace the portion of bliss which nature prepared it to receive."

"May the benevolent system spread to every corner of the globe; may we learn to recognize and to respect in other animals the feelings which vibrate in ourselves; may we be led to perceive that those cruel repasts are not more injurious to the creatures whom we devour than they are hostile to our health, which delights in innocent simplicity, and destructive of our happiness, which is wounded by every act of violence, while it feeds as it were on the prospect of well-being, and is raised to the highest summit of enjoyment by the sympathetic touch of social satisfaction."

"The Truth-Seeking Vision insists that the university’s overriding aim should be the preservation, pursuit, and promotion of truth.The Truth-Seekers further believe that the importance of that aim justifies the frictions and rivalries that inevitably arise, especially in demanding intellectual environments populated by brilliant but eccentric individuals more prone than most to idiosyncratic behaviour.By contrast, the Coddling Vision insists that although truth-seeking is a laudable and important aim, it should never supersede the greater goal of pursuing equality, diversity, and inclusion, or of maximising the psychological wellbeing of its members.As it happens, the Truth-Seeking Vision and the Coddling Vision do not come into open conflict quite as often as breathless press reports might lead one to imagine, though that is because tensions are almost always quietly resolved in favour of the Coddlers. Towards the end of last year, however, something unexpected happened: a few dozen of the Truth-Seekers, led by the indefatigable analytic philosopher Arif Ahmed, forced a series of votes challenging a brazen attempt by the University’s senior leadership to wire the Coddling Vision into the ancient fabric of Cambridge."