We ought not to extract pernicious honey from poison blossoms of misrepresentation and mendacious half-truth, to pamper the course appetite of bigotry and self-love.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeRead
The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Engaging in wrongdoing to prevent harm is inherently wrong.
This quote suggests that resorting to immoral actions in an attempt to avert negative consequences does not justify those actions. It highlights the ethical stance that doing harm, even for a purportedly good reason, is fundamentally misguided and cannot lead to true goodness.
Themes
EvilMoralityEthicsWrongdoingGoodness
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate about ethics, when discussing the consequences of actions.
More from Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All quotes βCommon sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeRead
And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeRead
Often do the spirits stride on before the event; and in today already walks tomorrow.
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Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeRead
To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeRead
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Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith.
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Those who deny the right of a jury to protect an individual in resisting an unjust law of the government, deny him all defence whatsoever against oppression.
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We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will.
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At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at remembering them.
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Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.
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The psychology of a language which, in one way or another, is imposed upon one because of factors beyond one's control, is very different from the psychology of a language which one accepts of one's free will.
Edward SapirRead