26 Quotes by Hans Jonas

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.

Act so that the effects of your actions are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.

Unlike the interference of ordinary interest, power, or prejudice, which touches philosophy only at its outskirts and becomes at most a matter for philosophical tactics, the claim of revelation to the highest truth touches philosophy at its core and must affect its whole strategy.

Being, in the testimony it gives of itself, informs us not only about what it is but also about what we owe it.

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

Never must the existence or the essence of man as a whole be made a stake in the hazards of action.

We do violence to the consciousness of a past age when we divide what was indivisible to it: the one sacred truth of the Christian creed.

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.

For a scientific theory of him to be possible, man, including his habits of valuation, has to be taken as determined by causal laws, as an instance and part of nature.