A great empire and little minds go ill together.
Edmund BurkeRead
In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority.
Interpretation
Democracy can lead to the tyranny of the majority over the minority.
This quote by Edmund Burke highlights the potential danger inherent in democratic systems, where the will of the majority can overpower and unjustly oppress minority groups. It serves as a cautionary reminder that democracy, while promoting equality and representation, can sometimes facilitate the very oppression it seeks to avoid if the rights of minorities are not protected.
In practice
During a lecture on political philosophy, this quote can be used to discuss the balance between majority rule and minority rights.
A great empire and little minds go ill together.
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.
The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis.
Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Science and religion, religion and science, put it as it may, they are the two sides of the same glass, through which we see darkly until these two focus together, reveal the truth.
It is dangerous when you start calling people from one part of the world terrorists or fanatic, and you reduce them to some abstract notion. If evil has a geographical place, and if the evil has a name, that is the beginning of fascism. Real life is not this way. You have fanatics and narrow-minded people everywhere.
When there is hallucination, there is the truth, by recognising it as hallucination. Where there is suffering, there is peace and bliss, by letting go and experiencing it for numberless suffering sentient beings. Always think of how others are kind and precious Treat them as you would like to be treated.
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Imagine" he said, "never even thinking, 'We are alone,' simply because it has never occurred to you to think that there's any other way to be.
Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.
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