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A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are NOT strengthening her posocial sense, you are damaging it-and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.
Martha Stout
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Confronting injustice and protecting oneself is crucial for a healthy conscience.

This quote emphasizes the importance of teaching individuals, especially young girls, to recognize and confront wrongdoing rather than suppressing their outrage for the sake of politeness. It suggests that failing to encourage assertiveness can lead to self-harm and a weakened sense of morality, as the inability to defend oneself may also inhibit the ability to stand up for others.

Themes

ConscienceOutrageSelf-DefenseAssertivenessMorality

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a discussion about teaching children the importance of standing up against bullying.

More from Martha Stout

Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.
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