The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
Interpretation
True character is revealed by actions taken in secrecy.
This quote suggests that a person's true character is determined by their choices and actions when they believe there will be no consequences or scrutiny. It emphasizes the importance of integrity and moral values that guide an individual's behavior, irrespective of external validation or fear of exposure. In essence, it encourages us to reflect on our ethical standards and the innate principles that govern our actions, even when no one is watching.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a leadership workshop to discuss ethical decision-making.
None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller.
Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything.
To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.
Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.
What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. Itβs not moral to lie to children. Itβs not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. Itβs immoral.
Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which people transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. People are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.
Men build society and society builds men.
Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.
Individual potential of life is cosmic potential. Individual is divine deep inside. Transcendental experience awakens that divinity in man. And when you kill a man you deprive him of that birthright of it.
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