A Quote by Booker T. Washington

I early learned that it is a hard matter to convert an individual by abusing him, and that this is more often accomplished by giving credit for all the praiseworthy actions performed than by calling attention alone to all the evil done.
To then say that our own actions in combating evil have led to evil, is nothing more than saying, "Islamic terrorists are somewhat justified, at least we can understand why they hate us because we've done things to make them hate us. ... We have been evil ourselves, and we are evil and that justifies them being evil."
We are not more ingenious in searching out bad motives for good actions when performed by others, than good motives for bad actions when performed by ourselves.
God bestows more consideration on the purity of the intention with which our actions are performed than on the actions themselves.
Using the language of heroism, calling Daniel Ellsberg a hero, and calling the other people who made great sacrifices heroes - even though what they have done is heroic - is to distinguish them from the civic duty they performed, and excuses the rest of us from the same civic duty to speak out when we see something wrong, when we witness our government engaging in serious crimes, abusing power, engaging in massive historic violations of the Constitution of the United States. We have to speak out or we are party to that bad action.
I've often thought - even though it's hard to give him even more credit than he has had - that Andy Warhol must have started a lot of 15 minutes of fame.
Early on, even before he was the front-runner, TV news was giving Trump far more attention than other candidates and far more than he deserved.
If you look at the works psychologists have done about individual reports of wellbeing, what happens is that if you're poor, you are not happy. But once you achieve a certain level of material satisfaction then income has very little correlation with people's reported states of happiness, things like climate matter more, things like the culture of the country in which you're raised matter more and so the things really, let's face it, like individual temperament matter more than these things.
By giving too much importance to fine actions one may end by paying an indirect but powerful tribute to evil, because in so doing one implies that such fine actions are only valuable because they are rare, and that malice or indifference are far more common motives in the actions of men.
Who said it could not be done? And tell me what great victories does he have to his credit which qualifies him to judge what can and can't be accomplished.
All pantheism must ultimately be shipwrecked on the inescapable demands of ethics, and then on the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany , then everything done by man, and even by animal, is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be more censurable and nothing more praiseworthy than anything else; hence there is no ethics.
No matter what you've done for yourself or for humanity, if you can't look back on having given love and attention to your own family, what have you really accomplished?
If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn't do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.
Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.
Very often in mathematics the crucial problem is to recognize and discover what are the relevant concepts; once this is accomplished the job may be more than half done.
And there is the matter of abortion. We must with calmness and resolve help the vast majority of our fellow Americans understand that the more than 112 million abortions performed in America in 1980 amount to a great moral evil, an assault on the sacredness of human life.
Whether it's the Axis of Evil, or the evils of eating meat, it is a concept that has all but lost the impact it once had, because everyone thinks different things in this world are evil. PETA thinks what we do to animals is evil, but I think their overzealous approach is evil. Evil, in more ways than one, is comparable to the truth: definitions vary from one individual to the next.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!