Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.
Interpretation
It's important to address the arguments of others before questioning their intentions.
This quote highlights the value of engaging with the rational aspects of a debate rather than descending into personal attacks. By prioritizing discussion about the arguments presented, we foster a more respectful and productive dialogue, which enables a deeper understanding and resolution of disagreements.
In practice
During a political debate, one might quote this to encourage focusing on policies rather than personal attacks.
A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.
Everyone recognizes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. . . Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values. Since these cannot be separated from the human organism and the social scene, the moral ways of man cannot be understood without knowledge of the ways of things and institutions.
In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.
Tolerance always has limits - it cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant.
Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.
The easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.
Speaking as a builder, if you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there.
A government capable of controlling the whole, and bringing its force to a point, is one of the prerequisites for national liberty. We combine in society, with an expectation to have our persons and properties defended against unreasonable exactions either at home or abroad.
Accustom yourself not to be disregarding of what someone else has to say: as far as possible enter into the mind of the speaker.
A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.
I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.
The attempt to remove evil from the world by killing a thousand evil - doers, only adds to the evil in the world.
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