If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.
Interpretation
The quote questions the nature of evil and accountability, suggesting that while evil may be a part of life, it can be addressed and remedied.
Horace Mann's quote explores the complexities of defining wickedness in a world where evil is deemed inevitable. It challenges the notion of accountability by questioning whether individuals can truly be labeled as wicked if evil is an inherent part of existence. The quote emphasizes that while evil may exist, it is also subject to correction and improvement, urging a perspective of hope and responsibility in the face of moral challenges.
In practice
During a debate on morality, one might quote this to discuss the nature of accountability in society.
Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
Peace - the word evokes the simplest and most cherished dream of humanity. Peace is, and has always been, the ultimate human aspiration. And yet our history overwhelmingly shows that while we speak incessantly of peace, our actions tell a very different story.
Home is the center of life. It's the wellspring of personhood. It's where we say we're ourselves.
With pop stars or film stars, we become the object of people's self-definition, as well as the object of sexual definition.
Ye shall only have foes to be hated; but not foes to be despised: ye must be proud of your foes.
As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of War our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence.
I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, but not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else β what do they look to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?
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