What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard ShawRead
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that individuals often justify their shameful actions by claiming they are fulfilling a duty.
George Bernard Shaw highlights a common human behavior where individuals, particularly those who may lack insight or wisdom, rationalize their wrongful actions by framing them as responsibilities or obligations. This reflects a tendency to evade accountability by appealing to a sense of duty, often masking the true nature of their actions and the shame associated with them.
In practice
During a discussion on morality, one might use this quote to illustrate how people often rationalize unethical decisions.
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.
The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.
Every day my conscience makes confession relying on the hope of Your mercy as more to be trusted than its own innocence.
Good or bad people can be democratically elected, but it is always easy to fight for human rights under this system.
Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life.
What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.
Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing.
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