To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
Interpretation
Having the permission to do something doesn't necessarily mean it is morally or ethically correct to do it.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the distinction between legality and morality. It suggests that just because one has the right to perform an action, it does not imply that the action is just or correct. It encourages individuals to consider the ethical implications of their choices, reminding us that rights do not absolve us from the responsibility of making right decisions.
In practice
During a debate on ethical issues, one might refer to this quote to emphasize moral responsibility.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.
It may be you fear more to deliver judgment upon me than I fear judgment.
And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.
Unless we establish some form of world government, it will not be possible for us to avert a World War III in the future.
To be sure, those who are actually engaged in combat - those who actually see the maimed bodies and mourning mothers - struggle more than the rest of us to make sense of the reality of war.
She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.
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