By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.
It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Acknowledging past wrongs is essential for personal growth and moral understanding.
This quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing and confronting one's past mistakes, particularly those that have caused harm to others. The author reflects on how the experience of being a bully not only haunts him but also shapes his moral compass, preventing him from arrogantly labeling himself as a good person without accountability for his actions. It suggests that true conscience and goodness arise from facing and understanding one's flaws.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on personal growth and accountability, one might say, 'As Tom Junod expresses, my experience as a bully shapes how I view my own conscience.'
More from Tom Junod
All quotes →Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.
That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.
Cooking is, to me, the perfect fusion of generosity and selfishness, indeed the resolution of generosity and selfishness, the answer to my torn nature.
I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.
The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.
Similar quotes
The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.
Envy assails the noblest: the winds howl around the highest peaks.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes with which Christ looks out his compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.
Only by a frank discussion of the very details of dying can we best deal with those aspects that frighten us the most. It is by knowing the truth... that we rid ourselves of that fear of the terra incognita of death.
The great home of the soul is the open road.
The Sage has no thinking mind and therefore there are no ‘others’ for him.