Sissela Bok Quotes

#1. Psychologists have found that we are more likely, in looking back at our lives, to remember high points and dramatic shifts in far greater proportion than ongoing stretches of happiness or misery.

Sissela Bok

#2. To mature is in part to realize that while complete intimacy and omniscience and power cannot be had, self-transcendence, growth, and closeness to others are nevertheless within one's reach.

Sissela Bok

#3. Secrecy is as indispensable to human beings as fire, and as greatly feared.

Sissela Bok

#4. Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.

Sissela Bok

#5. America may be the only society on earth to have experienced what has been called an 'epidemic of children killing children,' which is ravaging some of its communities today.

Sissela Bok

#6. While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive.

Sissela Bok

#7. Sitting too long in front of a screen proves both physically and psychologically debilitating, no matter how innocuous or even beneficial the programs may be.

Sissela Bok

#8. Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.

Sissela Bok

#9. We are all, in a sense, experts on secrecy. From earliest childhood we feel its mystery and attraction. We know both the power it confers and the burden it imposes. We learn how it can delight, give breathing space and protect.

Sissela Bok

#10. Trust is a social good to be protected just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink. When it is damaged, the community as a whole suffers; and when it is destroyed, societies falter and collapse

Sissela Bok

#11. Liars share with those they deceive the desire not to be deceived.

Sissela Bok

#12. Deceit and violence - these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings.

Sissela Bok

#13. Are people the best judges of their own happiness, or outsiders? In defining happiness, should we think of entire lives or of shorter periods such as moments, days, or years? And to what extent are virtue and happiness linked?

Sissela Bok

#14. I believe that a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society ... if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless.

Sissela Bok

#15. Some level of truthfulness has always been seen as essential to human society, no matter how deficient the observance of other moral principles.

Sissela Bok