A Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
On why I don't trust democracy without extremely powerful systems of accountability and recall What seems to be generosity is often only disguised ambition - which despises small interests to gain great ones.
Related Quotes
What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one.
What we take for high-mindedness is very often no other than ambition well disguised, that scorns means interests, only to pursuegreater.
We in the United States are very often - since we are a democracy and we have national interests, we've often made the mistake that a democracy has to adopt America's interests, and that is a contradiction because a democracy basically is people deciding what their interests are.
I have to trust people. There's no system of controls that can replace trust, so I need to reinforce that trust, and part of reinforcing trust is making sure that people feel accountability, and with accountability comes some degree of autonomy. You don't have one without the other.
Advocating democracy has, by other people, often been taken as a form of imperialism, and not without some justification. So the important thing in a democracy is that it doesn't necessarily have to agree with what America's interests are, and it doesn't necessarily have to be serving American interests.
When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life.
Abstract systems depend on trust, yet they provide none of the moral rewards which can be obtained from personalised trust, or were often available in traditional settings from the moral frameworks within which everyday life was undertaken. Moreover, the wholesale penetration of abstract systems into daily life creates risks which the individual is not well placed to confront; high-consequence risks fall into this category. Greater interdependence, up to and including globally independent systems, means greater vulnerability when untoward events occur that affect those systems as a whole.
Great opportunities are often disguised as small acts of service.
USNA had a great engineering school, which was one of my interests, and I knew I would benefit from the great discipline and accountability that Navy provides.
Opium is the only drug to' be rely'd on-all the boasted nostrums only take up time, and as the disease [is] often of short duration, or of small quantity, they have gain'd credit which they do not deserve.
Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which states seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of arts, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means of war.
You gotta trust your artist. I love writing pages without dialogue, which seems weird, I guess. But few things are as powerful in comics as a really strong silent page.
I don't believe we're only motivated by our own self-interests. Often out of crisis comes this enormous wellspring of generosity and motivation.
If there is an event for whatever reason, which interferes with the Internet or network communications, are people able to deal with it? It seems like our dependency on these systems is so great that the room for maneuver as it were is very small. So that is problematic.
His scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises.
Trust is the glue that holds everything together. It creates the environment in which all of the other elements win-win stewardship agreements, self-directing individuals and teams, aligned structures and systems, and accountability can flourish.
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