Thursday, December 20, 2007

"My husband gave me a necklace. It's fake. I requested fake. Maybe I'm paranoid, but in this day and age, I don't want something around my neck that's worth more than my head." - Rita Rudner

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"There is a story, probably apocryphal, about two altruists caught in a burning building, with the only exit wide enough to take one person at a time. The first altruist said to the second, 'After you', to which the second replied, 'No, I insist, after you.' And so they went on, each as deeply entrenched in his altruism as the other, until they were both consumed by the flames. Some feminists, noting that I have used the masculine pronoun to describe the two altruists, would no doubt point out that the moral of the story is the stupidity of male rationality."

--- Altruism and its limits / CL Ten, in Altruistic reveries : perspectives from the humanities and social sciences / edited by Basant K. Kapur and Kim-Chong Chong.