The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
Interpretation
A person's true honesty is reflected in their self-assessment rather than their financial statements.
This quote suggests that true honesty goes beyond formal declarations like tax returns and is better revealed through how individuals perceive themselves in everyday situations, such as their weight on a scale. It emphasizes the idea that our personal integrity is reflected in our private lives and the honesty we maintain about ourselves when no one is watching.
In practice
This quote can be used in a personal development seminar to illustrate the importance of self-reflection.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
I feel my heart break to see a nation ripped apart by it's own greatest strength - it's diversity.
Most animals are pragmatic about mysteries: If they run across something they don't understand, all they care about is whether it's edible and whether it's dangerous. Humans, on the other hand, are drawn to the mystery for its own sake.
Rich Mullins was the uneasy conscience of Christian music. He didn't live like a star. He'd taken a vow of poverty so that what he earned could be used to help others.
Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.
There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.
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