Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.
Interpretation
Conscience and cowardice are two sides of the same coin, with conscience being a socially accepted term.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde suggests that what we often perceive as moral conscience may actually be a manifestation of cowardice. He implies that the motivations driving our ethical choices might not stem from noble intentions, but rather from a fear of judgment or consequences, thus questioning the true nature of moral integrity and the complexity of human motivations.
In practice
In a discussion about moral dilemmas, this quote could be used to illustrate the complexity of ethical decision-making.
Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
On why I don't trust democracy without extremely powerful systems of accountability and recall What seems to be generosity is often only disguised ambition - which despises small interests to gain great ones.
You know, there was a recent poll which said that young people in the generation of the students here felt it was far more likely that they would see a UFO than that they would draw Social Security... It's very important you understand this. Once you understand this, you realize this is not an episode from the X Files, and you're not more likely to see a UFO if you do certain specific things.
Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents in this as philosophy to learn wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.
No, it's not that they're bad. It's that they're obliged to pretend they're good. They've been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don't want to be like that.
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