When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the moral implications of taking away someone's life, truth, or fairness, depicting them as thefts of basic human rights.
Khaled Hosseini's quote illustrates that actions such as killing, lying, and cheating are not merely wrong; they constitute a theft of fundamental rights from others. Each of these acts diminishes not only the victim's existence but also affects their loved ones and distorts the fabric of fairness and truth in society. The quote powerfully urges reflection on the consequences of our actions and their ripple effect on the lives of others.
In practice
During a discussion on ethics in a philosophy class.
You're gutless. It's how you were made. And that's not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you've never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.
There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break. - Amir
I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.
And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.
The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
We ought not to extract pernicious honey from poison blossoms of misrepresentation and mendacious half-truth, to pamper the course appetite of bigotry and self-love.
live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning.
No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
None but a good man is really a living man, and the more good any man does, the more he really lives. All the rest is death, or belongs to it.
Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?
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