Hans Jonas

Our duties and responsibilities as human beings must be shown to be so incontrovertible that even atheists must recognize them. There are ultimate taboos.

To me, it was a sad fate to have been born into a period and a world where everything was in tip-top order, and the only real excitement was to be found in history books and occasionally also in the paper.

As to each of us, the knowledge that we are here but briefly and a nonnegotiable limit is set to our expected time may even be necessary as the incentive to number our days and make them count.

That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation.

Modern theory is about objects lower than man; even stars, being common things, are lower than man.

Responsibility has become the fundamental imperative in modern civilization, and it should be an unavoidable criterion to assess and evaluate human actions, including, in a special way, development activities.