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.
There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
I was supposed to be waiting up here when you got back, only your Phoenix lot got in the way...” “Yes, they do that,” said Dumbledore.
Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy.
There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.
There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white.
Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life.
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