I am like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can't stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.
Abraham LincolnRead
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a profound disdain for the argument supporting slavery by suggesting that proponents should personally experience its consequences.
Abraham Lincoln's quote highlights the inherent hypocrisy in advocating for slavery; it challenges individuals who support such a brutal system to endure the same fate they advocate for others. This statement underscores the moral obligation to empathize with the suffering of others and serves as a critique of any ideology that seeks to dehumanize individuals based on arbitrary characteristics.
In practice
In a discussion about social justice, one might use this quote to challenge opposing views on human rights.
I am like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he can't stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.
Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
For it has been said, all that a man hath will he give for his life; and while all contribute of their substance the soldier puts his life at stake, and often yields it up in his country's cause. The highest merit, then is due to the soldier.
And having thus chosen our course, without guile, and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.
The law is the collective organization of the individual's right to lawful defense of his life, liberty and property. When it is used for anything else, no matter how noble the cause, it becomes perverted and justice is weakened. Thus, the law has become perverted by stupid greed and false philanthropy.
The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'
And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.
I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.
Some people, both scientists and religious people, deal with uncertainty by being certain. That is dangerous in the fundamentalists and it is dangerous in the fundamentalist scientists.
If we turn to the differences separating Communist, Fascist, and National Socialist regimes, we find that they can be accounted for by contrasting social, economic, and cultural condition in which the three had to operate. In other words, they resulted from tactical adaptation of the same philosophy of government to local circumstances, not from different philosophies.
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