Harm Quotes - Page 15

• Anger is always concerned with individuals, ... whereas hatred is directed also against classes: we all hate any thief and any informer. Moreover, anger can be cured by time; but hatred cannot. The one aims at giving pain to its object, the other at doing him harm; the angry man wants his victim to feel; the hater does not mind whether they feel or not.

  Aristotle

  Pain, Hate, Anger

  Aristotle (1924). “The Works of Aristotle”

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• The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm.

  Samuel Johnson

  Pain, Mind, Operations

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1837). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq”, p.373

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• You cannot make steel until you have made the iron white-hot in fire. It is not meant for harm. Trouble and disease have a lesson for us. Our painful experiences are not meant to destroy us, but to burn out our dross, to hurry us back Home. No one is more anxious for our release than God.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Home, Fire, Painful Experiences

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• Truth does less good in the world than its appearances do harm.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Truth, Doe, World

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• Truth does not do as much good in the world as its imitations do harm.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Doe, World, Imitation

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• What harm cause not those huge draughts or pictures which wanton youth with chalk or coals draw in each passage, wall or stairs of our great houses, whence a cruel contempt of our natural store is bred in them?

  Michel de Montaigne

  Wall, House, Graffiti

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• It is not easy for a person to do any great harm when his tenure of office is short, whereas long possession begets tyranny.

  Aristotle

  Long, Office, Easy

  Aristotle (2016). “Politics”, p.180, Aristotle

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• There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world.

  Allan Bloom

  Winning, Views, Parent

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• There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.

  John Ruskin

  Jesus, Thinking, Expectations

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• People don't simply wake up one day and commit genocide. They start by setting themselves apart from others, diminishing the stature of those adhering to dissenting beliefs in small, insidious steps. They begin by saying, 'We're the righteous, and we'll tolerate those others.' And as the toleration diminishes over time, the inevitable harms are overlooked. It is for that reason that James Madison wisely wrote that 'it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties'.

  Michael Newdow

  People, One Day, Liberty

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• Like other discriminatory legislation in our country's history, immigration laws define and differentiate legal status on the basis of arbitrary attributes. Immigration laws create unequal rights. People who break immigration laws don't cause harm or even potential harm (unlike, for example, drunk driving, which creates the potential for harm even if no accident occurs). Rather, people who break immigration laws do things that are perfectly legal for others, but denied to them--like crossing a border or, even more commonly, simply exist.

  Aviva Chomsky

  Country, Rights, Law

  Aviva Chomsky (2007). “They Take Our Jobs!: And 20 Other Myths about Immigration”, p.184, Beacon Press

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• The science of legislation is like that of medicine in one respect: that it is far more easy to point out what will do harm than what will do good.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Medicine, Easy, Legislation

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”, p.219

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• ... religious controversy does only harm. It destroys humble inquiry after truth, and throws all the energies into an attempt to prove ourselves right-a spirit in which no man gets at truth.

  Frederick William Robertson

  Religious, Humble, Men

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• I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I dont believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Believe, Men, Law

  Abraham Lincoln, Mario Matthew Cuomo, G. S. Boritt (2004). “Lincoln on Democracy”, p.176, Fordham Univ Press

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• No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Flower, Snakes, Yellow

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• There are times when even justice brings harm with it.

  Sophocles

  Justice

  Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (1959). “Sophocles”

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• Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal; The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow speared by the shrike, And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Nature, World, Sparrows

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson (2014). “Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Selected Poetry: A Broadview Anthology of British Literature Edition”, p.216, Broadview Press

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• The popularity of disaster movies expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.

  David Mamet

  Symbolic Meaning, Perception, Tragedy

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• A Foreign Secretaryand this applies also to a prospective Foreign Secretaryis always faced with this cruel dilemma. Nothing he can say can do very much good, and almost anything he may say may do a great deal of harm. Anything he says that is not obvious is dangerous; whatever is not trite is risky. He is forever poised between the cliche and the indiscretion.

  Harold MacMillan

  Forever, May, Cliche

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• I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

  James Dickey

  Mean, Thinking, Honor

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• Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Use, Function, Human Condition

  "Mist". Book by Miguel de Unamuno, 1914.

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• A political movement must keep in touch with reality and the prevailing conditions. Long speeches, the shaking of fists, the banging of tables, and strongly worded resolutions out of touch with the objective conditions do not bring about mass action and can do a great deal of harm to the organization and the struggle we serve.

  Nelson Mandela

  Struggle, Reality, Organization

  Nelson Mandela (1978). “The struggle is my life”

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• I hear from patients who say their doctor said, 'If you want to take Vitamin C, go ahead and do it. It won't harm you, and it may do you some good.' More and more physicians are getting convinced about the value of large doses of Vitamin C.

  Linus Pauling

  Doctors, Vitamins, Physicians

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• Not that I want the current president killed. I will, for the record and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm, clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.

  Sarah Vowell

  Mean, Fbi Agents, President

  FaceBook post by Sarah Vowell from Aug 31, 2008

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• If even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and drug rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to users could be dramatic.

  Milton Friedman

  Compassion, Punishment, Drug

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