As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have; but, in their stead, / Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath, / Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not" (5.3.25-28).
William ShakespeareRead
The arms are fair, When the intent of bearing them is just.
Interpretation
The fairness of using weapons is determined by the righteousness of one's motives.
In this quote, Shakespeare suggests that the legitimacy of wielding power or weaponry depends not on the arms themselves, but on the intentions of the person using them. If one has just and noble intentions, then their use of force can be deemed fair; otherwise, it becomes unjust and morally questionable.
In practice
This quote could be used in a debate about the ethics of military intervention.
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have; but, in their stead, / Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath, / Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not" (5.3.25-28).
Love bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Good company, good wine, good welcome, can make good people.
Absence doth sharpen love, presence strengthens it; the one brings fuel, the other blows it till it burns clear.
Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!
Give it an understanding, but no tongue.
We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.
No doubt many people have the feeling that to talk about death at all is, in effect, to conjure it up mentally, to bring it closer in such a way that one has to face up to the inevitability of one's own eventual demise. So, to spare ourselves this psychological trauma, we decide just to try to avoid the topic as much as possible.
Live out your life in truth and justice, tolerant of those who are neither true nor just.
Even if we accept, as the basic tenet of true democracy, that one moron is equal to one genius, is it necessary to go a further step and hold that two morons are better than one genius?
Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.
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