Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
E. M. ForsterRead
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Public life can be organized in a way that can compromise morality.
E. M. Forster's quote suggests that as society becomes more structured and regulated, the ethical standards of those involved often deteriorate. This implies that the complexities and demands of public life can lead to moral compromises and a decline in individual ethics as people prioritize organization over integrity.
Themes
MoralityPublic LifeEthicsSocietyOrganization
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of ethics in leadership.
More from E. M. Forster
All quotes βA poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. ForsterRead
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
E. M. ForsterRead
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
E. M. ForsterRead
The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
E. M. ForsterRead
One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
E. M. ForsterRead
Similar quotes
Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
J. M. CoetzeeRead
All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.
Derek WalcottRead
Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube, you know. It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can't fight the world alone.
Noam ChomskyRead
If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.
Franz KafkaRead
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
Noam ChomskyRead