How long had he been doing what was necessary instead of what was right? In a fair world they would be one and the same.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the moral conflict between necessity and morality, suggesting both should ideally align in a just world.
This quote by Robert Jordan explores the tension between actions taken for necessity and those taken for moral correctness. It highlights the frustration of living in a reality where individuals often have to choose between doing what is necessary for survival and what they believe is ethically right, suggesting that true fairness would see these two align seamlessly.
In practice
In a debate about ethical business practices, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of aligning actions with moral values.
Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing.
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
Til shade is gone, til water is gone Into the shadow with teeth bared Screaming defiance with the last breath To spit in Sightblinder’s eye on the Last Day.
He came like the wind, like the wind touched everything, and like the wind was gone. -from The Dragon Reborn. By Loial, son of Arent son of Halan, the Fourth Age.
The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.
Duty is heavier than a mountain, Dai Shan.' That time, Lan did flinch. How long had it been since someone had been able to do that to him with mere words? He remembered teaching that same concept to a youth out of the Two Rivers. A sheepherder, innocent of the world, fearful of the fate laid out before him by the Pattern.
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
What greater grief than the loss of one's native land.
We were told that they wished merely to pass through our country. . . to seek for gold in the far west . . . Yet before the ashes of the council are cold, the Great Father is building his forts among us. . . . His presence here is . . . an insult to the spirits of our ancestors. Are we then to give up their sacred graves to be allowed for corn?
With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.
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