Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
Max LernerRead
When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Evil often disguises itself as righteousness through the beliefs of its perpetrators.
This quote suggests that individuals who commit acts of evil often do not see themselves as villains; rather, they perceive their actions as noble or justified. It highlights the moral ambiguity of human behavior, where the same act can be viewed as honorable by one group while being considered evil by another, indicating a deep complexity in ethics and morality.
Themes
EvilHonorMoralityEthicsHuman BehaviorJustification
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on moral philosophy, one might use this quote to illustrate the complexity of ethical decision-making.
More from Max Lerner
All quotes βThe 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.
Max LernerRead
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.
Max LernerRead
You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.
Max LernerRead
Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.
Max LernerRead
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.
Max LernerRead
Similar quotes
From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.
Wilhelm DiltheyRead
This is the book I never read ~ These are the words I never said ~ This is the path I'll never tread ~ These are the dreams I'll dream instead
Annie LennoxRead
This, then, is the truth of the discourse of universal human rights: the Wall separating those covered by the umbrella of Human Rights and those excluded from its protective cover. Any reference to universal human rights as an 'unfinished project' to be gradually extended to all people is here a vain ideological chimera - and, faced with this prospect, do we, in the West, have any right to condemn the excluded when they use any means, inclusive of terror, to fight their exclusion?
Slavoj IekRead
I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.
Terry PratchettRead
For those who have obtained unobstructed knowledge of Self, the world is seen merely as a bondage causing imagination.
Ramana MaharshiRead
It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.
Sylvia PlathRead