Introduction: Pondering the Imponderable

Abstract

Terror is a six-letter word. So is murder.

Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death’s fool;

What’s yet in this

That bears the name of life

Lie hid moe thousand deaths: yet we fear,

That makes these odds all even….

To sue to live, I find I seek to die:

And, seeking death, find life: let it come on….

The sense of death is most in apprehension;

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where:…

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment

Can lay on nature is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act III, i.

Our war against terror is only beginning.

President George W. Bush

This is not just a question of fighting terrorism…. This is a milestone in history, like Hitler and Napoleon. What we’re finding is that there can’t be economic globalization without human and spiritual globalization. We have to look for the causes of things. If you assume that human beings are not totally bad in themselves, then something must have gone terribly wrong.

Christoph von Dohnanyi

Surely it is time, half a century after Hiroshima, to embrace a universal morality, to think of all children, everywhere, as our own.

Howard Zinn