English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.
Malcolm BradburyRead
But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.
Interpretation
Our actions impact others, and ignoring this responsibility is a form of cruelty.
Malcolm Bradbury's quote emphasizes the interconnectedness of human actions and their effects on others. It highlights the moral responsibility individuals have to recognize how their decisions affect people around them, suggesting that ignorance of this reality can lead to a profound cruelty by perpetuating harm or neglecting the well-being of others.
In practice
In a discussion about personal responsibility in social issues.
English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.
I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessing on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning.
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
Men will find that they can ... avoid far more easily the perils which beset them on all sides by united action.
I ask you only to stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make a beginning-it is not as hard as you think.
What is more absurd and more impious than to attribute the name of Lucifer to the devil, that is, to personified evil. The intellectual Lucifer is the spirit of intelligence and love; it is the paraclete, it is the Holy Spirit, while the physical Lucifer is the great agent of universal magnetism.
In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.