THE SHORTEST FABLE

By Friedrich Nietzsche

In some remote corner of the universe that is poured out in countless solar sistems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the most arrogant and the most untruthful moment in "world history" -yet indeed only a moment. After nature had taken a few breaths, the froze over and the clever animals had to die.

The end.

It's taken from: Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language. Edited and Translated with a Critical Introduction by Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair and David J. Parent. New York. Oxford University Press. 1989.

A HORRID SCENE

By: George Orwell

April 4th, 1984

Last night to the flicks. Al war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him. First you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, them you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water. Audience shouting with laughter when he sank. Then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. There was a middleaged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. Little boy screaming with fright an hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms around him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself. All the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. Then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. Then there was a wonderful shot of a childs arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot  of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of the kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kinds it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppuse anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never.

It's taken from:  Orwell, George. (1949). 1984. New American Library. New York.         

WHAT'S THE MORAL SENSE?

By Mark Twain

I was thinking to myself that I should like to see what the inside of the jail was like; Satan overheard the thought, and the next moment we were in the jail. We were in the torture-chamber, Satan said. The rack was there, and the other instruments, and there was a smoky lantern or two hanging on the walls and helping to make the place look dim and dreadful. There were people there -and  executioners- but as they took no notice of us, it meant tha we were invisible. A young man lay bound, and Satan said he was suspected of being a heretic, and the executioners were about to inquire into it. They asked the man to confess to the charge, and he said he could not, for it was not true. Then they drove splinter after splinter under his nails, and he shrieked with the pain. Satan was not disturbed, but I could not endure it, and had to be whisked out of there. I was faint and sick, but the fresh air revived me, and we walked toward my home. I said it was a brutal thing.

¨No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it, ¨ and he went on talking like that. ¨It is like your paltry race -always lying, always claiming virtues which it hasn't got, always denying them to the higher animals, which alone possess them. No brute ever does a cruel thing- that is monopoly of those with  the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflcting it -only man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his! A sense whose function is to distinguish between right and wrong, with liberty to choose which of them he will do. Now what advantage can he get out of that? He is always choosing, and in nine cases out of ten he prefers the wrong. There shouldn't be any wrong; and without the Moral Sense there couldn't be any. And yet he is such an unreasoning creature that he is not able to perceive the Moral Sense desgrades him to the bottom layer of the animated beings and is a shameful possession.

Taken it: Mark Twain, Dover Publications. 2014. Págs. 481-482