David Smail Quotes

#1. Our capacity as human beings for imagination and storytelling makes us exquisitely vulnerable to exploitation by those who understand the properties of ideological power.

David Smail

#2. It is incumbent upon us to do what we can, even if we cannot do much.

David Smail

#3. The principle locations of exploitation have moved, through the mechanism of 'globalisation', to where most of us can't see them and don't really care about them if we do.

David Smail

#4. Science is about our passionate conviction that we are placed within a universe that is not simply the result of our imaginings, and our longing and determination to understand it. Ultimately, science is about reality, truth and freedom.

David Smail

#5. Suffering is a form of knowledge. It tells us what is wrong with our world.

David Smail

#6. The social havoc wreaked by unfettered economic greed comes to be interiorised as the personal weakness and irresponsibility of those principally affected.

David Smail

#7. There is, I suggest, a strong positive correlation between a) the height of the rung occupied on the ladder of power, b) the strength of a sense of personal virtue, and c) the firmness of the conviction that those lower down could and certainly should act more responsibly.

David Smail