If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.
Interpretation
The quote questions the nature of evil and accountability, suggesting that while evil may be a part of life, it can be addressed and remedied.
Horace Mann's quote explores the complexities of defining wickedness in a world where evil is deemed inevitable. It challenges the notion of accountability by questioning whether individuals can truly be labeled as wicked if evil is an inherent part of existence. The quote emphasizes that while evil may exist, it is also subject to correction and improvement, urging a perspective of hope and responsibility in the face of moral challenges.
In practice
During a debate on morality, one might quote this to discuss the nature of accountability in society.
Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
The individual can maintain himself in a society definitely organized only through possessing an equally definite mental and moral constitution. This is what the neuropath lacks. His state of disturbance causes him to be constantly taken by surprise by circumstances.
It is worth while dying, to find out what life is.
Please explain to me what being an icon is. How do you define it? I haven't been given a script. I don't know what the dialogues of an icon are.
The synergetic integral of the totality of all principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans--in pure principle--we do not and never will know all the principles
Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.
Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.