Neutrality

Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Neutral indicates a condition neither positive nor negative in reference to some quality. Neutrality in philosophy, is a tendency not to actively participate in physical or ideological conflicts, which does not necessarily imply that neutral parties are indifferent, apathetic, or ignorant of the these, but does indicate they have concerns which prevent involvement. In common use "neutral" can be synonymous with "unbiased", but bias can indicate forms of preference, distinct from tendencies to act upon such, even without unjust favoritism. Neutrality in international relations is applied to nations which officially declare themselves to be neutral towards the belligerents in particular conflicts. A state can be non-belligerent yet need not be neutral, while armed neutrality is a stance of any state or group of states which makes no alliances with any side in a conflict, but assert that they will defend themselves against resulting incursions from all parties. In semiotics the neutral level of signs are the material creation or remains of esthesic and poietic processes, levels, and analyses of symbolic forms; the "trace" left behind by a spiritual or ideal creation.

Quotes

Sorted alphabetically by author or source

No one took the voice of the journalist further away from "neutral background" (or seemed less able to stop himself doing it) than Hunter S. Thompson. Even at the start of his career, he was no believer in journalistic neutrality. ~ Hari Kunzru

The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. ~ Jean-Luc Picard, of Star Trek: The Next Generation

The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities. ~ Jimmy Wales

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. ~ Elie Wiesel

Armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable. ~ Woodrow Wilson

• The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.
  • Theodor Adorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) as translated by E. Jephcott, p. 17

• Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it.
  Let's see whether the United States is capable as acting according to its important values, or whether it is, as so many people are saying, run by the misguided short-term interested of large corporations.
  I hope that Congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to innovate in the internet space. I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated.
  • Tim Berners-Lee, in "Net Neutrality: This is Serious" (June 2006)

• Hayek forced into public discourse the question of the compatibility of democracy and statism. And unlike Burnham, he made no pretense of neutrality about the phenomena he described. … In responding to Burnham and Hayek … liberals were in fact responding to a powerful strain of Jeffersonian anti-statism in American political culture … The result was a subtle but important shift in liberal thinking.
  • Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform : New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995)

• Net neutrality is the First Amendment issue of our time. Today, a blog can load as fast as the Wall Street Journal — and, if the blog is good, it can get more traffic than any media conglomerate. But if bigger companies can pay for faster, priority Internet access, that blogger no longer has a shot. And these big companies know that when they pay for access, they win. They want preferred treatment on the Internet like the preferred treatment they get in the rest of their lives.
  • Al Franken, in "Sen. Franken's Speech to Free Press Group in Minneapolis" (19 August 2010)

• I've said that net neutrality is the most important free speech issue of our time. It's true. If Republicans have their way, large corporations won't just have the loudest voices in the room. They'll be able to effectively silence everyone else. Every small business they'd prefer not to compete with. Every blogger who publishes something they don't like. We have to stop them.
  • Al Franken, in "Net Neutrality Is Under Attack... Again" in The Huffington Post (8 November 2011)

• My leading idea was the establishment of a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other.
  • Horace Greeley, on the founding of the New-York Tribune, in Recollections of a Busy Life (1868). p. 137

• Donald Judd spoke of a "neutral" surface, but what is meant? Neutrality must involve some relationship (to other ways of painting, thinking?) He would have to include these in his work to establish the neutrality of that surface. He also used "non" or "not" – expressive – this is an early problem – a negative solution or – expression of new sense – which can help one into – what one has not known. "Neutral" expresses an intention.
  • Jasper Johns, in Book A (sketchbook), p 31, c 1963: as quoted in Jasper Johns, Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews (1996), edited by Kirk Varnedoe, p. 50

• People say that my works are "neutral". But if you paint something, it is "something", and it cannot be neutral. Being neutral is a mere expression of a form of intention.
  • Jasper Johns, as quoted in Jasper Johns in Tokyo (August 1964), by Yoshiaki Tono; later in Jasper Johns, Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews (1996), edited by Kirk Varnedoe, p. 101

• Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
  • John F. Kennedy, misquoting Dante at the signing of a charter establishing the German Peace Corps, Bonn, West Germany (24 June 1963). Dante placed those who "non furon ribelli né fur fedeli" [were neither for nor against God] in a special region near the mouth of Hell; the lowest part of Hell, a lake of ice, was for traitors.

• Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., in Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)

• Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. "Ye shall know the truth," says Jesus, "and the truth shall set you free." Now, I've chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., in "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam", as speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia (30 April 1967); in this he refers to the Dante misquote which originated with John F. Kennedy.

• No one took the voice of the journalist further away from ‘neutral background’ (or seemed less able to stop himself doing it) than Hunter S. Thompson. Even at the start of his career, he was no believer in journalistic neutrality. … Certainly Thompson is a peculiarly misshapen sort of moralist, one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.
  • Hari Kunzru, in "The First Person, Steroid-Enhanced" a review of two of Thompson's works in London Review of Books, Vol. 20, No. 20, (15 October 1998)

• In the book-length analysis of Doctor Who, John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado characterize the political outlook of the program as consistent with the BBC's particular brand of political neutrality: skeptical, aggressive, quizzical, and amused towards all forms of political power. In Doctor Who the attitude gets further flavored by the Doctors "Romantic" hero mystique. This characteristic allows him to adopt a "liberal-populist role in criticizing 'sectionalist' forces of 'Left' and 'Right,' and in rebuking the 'official' and the powerful, whether in big business, the military, government or 'militant' unions. … The political form that most resembles these critiques is liberal democracy, which places sovereignty in the hands of the people.

• • David Layton, referring to "Doctor Who : The Unfolding Text (1984) by John Tulloch and [[w:Manuel Alvarado|], in The Humanism of Doctor Who : A Critical Study in Science Fiction and Philosophy (2012), Ch. 10 : Politics

• The State must be made efficient for the work which concerns only the people of the State; and the nation for that which concerns all the people. There must remain no neutral ground to serve as a refuge for lawbreakers, and especially for lawbreakers of great wealth, who can hire the vulpine legal cunning which will teach them how to avoid both jurisdictions.
  • Theodore Roosevelt, in The New Nationalism, a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas (31 August 1910)

• Information smacks of safe neutrality; it is simple, helpful heaping of unassailable facts. In that innocent guise, its the perfect starting point for a technocratic political agenda that wants as little exposure for its objectives as possible. After all, what can anyone say against information?
  • Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The folklore of computers and the true art of thinking, 1968, p. 19

• No identification of self or mission. No interference with the social development of said planet. No references to space or the fact that there are other worlds or civilizations.
  • The Prime Directive of the United Federation of Planets, promoting minimal involvement and interference in the development of alien civilizations, as expressed, in The Original Series, "Bread and Circuses" (15 March 1968), written by Gene Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon.

• The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.
• Jean-Luc Picard, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Symbiosis" (18 April 1988), witten by Robert Lewin, Richard Manning, and Hans Beimler

• If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
  • Desmond Tutu, as quoted in Ending Poverty As We Know It : Guaranteeing a Right to a Job at a Living Wage (2003) by William P. Quigley, p. 8

• Most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities.
  • Jimmy Wales, in "How a ragtag band created Wikipedia" TED Talk (July 2005); this has sometimes appeared paraphrased as "The real struggle is not between the right and the left but between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks."

• In recognizing that words have the power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called “emotion” and its concomitant evaluation.
  • Richard Weaver, in Language is Sermonic (1970), “The Power of the Word,” p. 37

• The eloquent Lysias, posing as a non-lover, had concealed designs upon Phaedrus, so that his fine speech was really a sheep’s clothing. Socrates discerned in him a “peculiar craftiness.” One must suspect the same today of many who ask us to place our faith in the neutrality of their discourse.
  • Richard Weaver, in The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953), “The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 22

• I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
  • Elie Wiesel, in his Nobel acceptance speech (10 December 1986)

• The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name...We must be impartial in thought as well as in action.
  • Woodrow Wilson, in a message to the Senate (19 August 1914)

• We stand apart, unembroiled, conscious of our own principles, conscious of what we hope and purpose. … Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt.
  • Woodrow Wilson, in an address to the Daughters of the American Revolution (11 October 1915)

• We have stood apart, studiously neutral.
  • Woodrow Wilson, in a message to Congress (7 December 1915)

• Armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable.
  • Woodrow Wilson, in Address asking for a declaration of war (2 April 1917)

• Surely, we want to be objective if that means telling the truth as we see it, not concealing information that may be embarrassing to our point of view. But we don’t want to be objective if it means pretending that ideas don’t play a part in the social struggles of our time, that we don’t take sides in those struggles.
  Indeed, it is impossible to be neutral. In a world already moving in certain directions, where wealth and power are already distributed in certain ways, neutrality means accepting the way things are now. It is a world of clashing interests – war against peace, nationalism against internationalism, equality against greed, and democracy against elitism – and it seems to me both impossible and undesirable to be neutral in those conflicts.
  • Howard Zinn, in Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1990), p. 6

• I don't believe it's possible to be neutral. The world is already moving in certain directions, and to be neutral, to be passive in a situation like that, is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I, as a teacher, do not want to be a collaborator with whatever is happening in the world. I want myself, as a teacher, and I want you, as students, to intercede with whatever is happening in the world.
  • Howard Zinn, in Howard Zinn: You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004)