Quotes from Robert C. Solomon

If a currency is to become a growing, an increasing reserve currency, there has to be not only a demand for it there has to be a supply of it.

There is a European Central Bank, of course, established and it has the structure similar to the Federal Reserve system, not precisely the same but similar.

Some countries that are close to Europe that already hold Deutschemarks, clearly would automatically hold euros, those are countries in Eastern Europe mainly, a few countries in Africa.

The reserve currency role seems to add prestige to an area and some people in Europe have talked about the desirability of the euro becoming an international reserve currency.

Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition

In the United States, securities markets are much more developed than they are in Europe.

Building trust is no longer a matter of creating structures and practices within a single culture.

We also confuse trust with familiarity.

Building trust requires talking and thinking about trust.

Building trust begins with an appreciation and understanding of trust, but it also requires practice and practices.

Peace comes with trust, which will grow from continuing efforts toward mutual understanding and trade, Romeo-and-Juliet-style marriages, conversations,negotiations, and individual commitments.

Building trust means thinking about trust in a positive way.

True, trust necessarily carries with it uncertainties, but we must force ourselves to think about these uncertainties as possibilities and opportunities, not as liabilities.

Trust is not bound up with knowledge so much as it is with freedom, the openness to the unknown.

Many people are blind to trust, not so much to its benefits as to its nature and the practices that make it possible.

Trust and the ability to identify trustworthiness are not the same thing, although trust and trustworthiness are logically linked.

When we say that trust is an emotional skill, this implies that emotional competence is a necessary part of trust.

All trust involves vulnerability and risk, and nothing would count as trust if there were no possibility of betrayal.

What gives life meaning is a form of rebellion, rebellion against reason, an insistence on believing passionately what we cannot believe rationally. The meaning of life is to be found in passion—romantic passion, religious passion, passion for work and for play, passionate commitments in the face of what reason knows to be meaningless.

Nietzsche says very clearly all the way through his career that if you want to define human nature the first thing you must say is that human beings insist on value--we see the world through value colored eyes. We do not know how to look at things neutrally, value-free. So, it's not a question of giving up all values, it's simply a question of which values.

W]hat we also see in sex is a kind of submissiveness. But not a kind of submissiveness which is simply 'do what you like, I'm just here for you', but it...is, or can be, very manipulative. It is a way of getting the other person to exercise all his or her efforts towards pleasing you, and in that way controlling what they're thinking, and in particular what they're thinking of you.

The thoroughly guilty man has an advantage over all of us; he cannot be found more guilty of anything, since he has already found himself guilty of everything. This may sound like an absurdity - causing oneself extreme pain in order not to feel any number of little pains of lesser guilts and shames, but it has its own logic. A man more easily adapts to what he inflicts upon himself; as to his own judgement, he is already committed to it and willing to live with it.

Whether one sees the world as God's creation or as a secular mystery that science is on the way to figuring out, there is no denying the beauty and majesty of everything from mountain ranges, deserts, and rain forests to the exquisite details in the design of an ordinary mosquito.

A woman's death, through much of the same history, was thought to be a simpler thing, preferably quiet and uncomplaining, or tragically in childbirth. Just as women were denied the right and the capacity to a full life, they were denied the right and the capacity to a full death as well.