American Prometheus

I’ve spent my day off with this wonderful biography of J Robert Oppenheimer. This quotation, on cruelty and responsibility is particularly striking, I think…

Perhaps she would not have considered evil to be so rare, so extraordinary, so estranging a state, to which it was so restful to emigrate, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone, that indifference to the sufferings one causes, an indifference which, whatever names one may give it, is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.

American Prometheus