Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
Max LernerRead
The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.
Interpretation
Lying in bed allows you to reflect and identify what is truly important in life.
This quote emphasizes the value of reflection and discernment. When lying in bed late, one can take a moment to consider the significance of various thoughts and concerns, evaluating what truly demands attention and what is merely trivial. This state of contemplation helps prioritize one's actions based on genuine importance rather than being driven by distractions or pressures.
In practice
In a discussion about work-life balance, one might quote this to emphasize the need for reflection.
Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.
You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.
When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.
Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.
The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.
[T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace.
With an open mind, seek and listen to all the highest ideals. Consider the most enlightened thoughts. Then choose your path, person by person, each for oneself.
He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; and he that dares not reason is a slave.
...and knowledge is one of the finest attributes of man - though often it is most loudly voiced by those who strive for it the least.
As much as I want to help people, I had to accept the fact long ago that being stupid with money isn't illegal.
We learned many years ago that the rich may have money, but the poor have time.
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