Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the harshness of punishment in society compared to the occurrences of crime.
Oscar Wilde's quote critiques the nature of justice and punishment throughout history. He suggests that societies are more morally degraded by the consistent use of punishment against individuals, particularly those who are inherently good, than they are harmed by the crimes committed by the wicked. This points to a troubling aspect of human behavior where the mechanisms of justice, rather than the acts of crime themselves, can lead to greater brutality and moral decline within a community.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about criminal justice reform, this quote can emphasize the need to reconsider harsh punishments.
More from Oscar Wilde
All quotes →London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Similar quotes
Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.
Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
Today, if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other-that man, that woman, that child is my brother or my sister. If everyone could see the image of God in his neighbor, do you think we would still need tanks and generals?
I'm not one of those people who's so blinded by my own work and my sweat. It's kind of risky writing a memoir when you're really part of a larger universe.