The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live.
Interpretation
Public safety is often prioritized above all other concerns, yet we often overlook this principle in our daily lives.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard critiques how society often neglects the paramount importance of public safety, suggesting that we have tacitly accepted a compromise that undermines the safety of the innocent. It highlights the moral dilemma we face when considering values such as freedom, privacy, and personal choice against the fundamental need to protect those who are vulnerable in our communities.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about policy-making and how laws protect citizens.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
I went inside my heart to see how it was. Something there makes me hear the whole world weeping.
...It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.
Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.
Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator
It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
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