Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
The history of women is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the oppression faced by women throughout history, suggesting it is a pervasive and enduring form of tyranny.
Oscar Wilde's quote delves into the historical subjugation of women, characterizing it as a profound and lasting tyranny that contrasts with other forms of oppression. He emphasizes that this particular tyranny is not just about strength; rather, it points to societal dynamics where the marginalized exert control over the powerful, leading to a complex and often overlooked aspect of history that continues to impact society.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion on gender studies to illustrate the historical context of women's struggles.
More from Oscar Wilde
All quotes →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
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An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I'm from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.
Now therefore, that my mind is free from all cares, and that I have obtained for myself assured leisure in peaceful solitude, I shall apply myself seriously and freely to the general destruction of all my former opinions.
We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.
There are some who, for varying reasons, would appease Red China. They are blind to history's clear lesson, for history teaches with unmistakable emphasis that appeasement but begets new and bloodier war. It points to no single instance where this end has justified that means, where appeasement has led to more than a sham peace. Like blackmail, it lays the basis for new and successively greater demands until, as in blackmail, violence becomes the only other alternative.