By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.
Tom JunodRead
It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Acknowledging past wrongs is essential for personal growth and moral understanding.
This quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing and confronting one's past mistakes, particularly those that have caused harm to others. The author reflects on how the experience of being a bully not only haunts him but also shapes his moral compass, preventing him from arrogantly labeling himself as a good person without accountability for his actions. It suggests that true conscience and goodness arise from facing and understanding one's flaws.
Themes
ConscienceBullyingPersonal GrowthMoralitySelf-Reflection
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on personal growth and accountability, one might say, 'As Tom Junod expresses, my experience as a bully shapes how I view my own conscience.'
More from Tom Junod
All quotes →Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.
Tom JunodRead
That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.
Tom JunodRead
Cooking is, to me, the perfect fusion of generosity and selfishness, indeed the resolution of generosity and selfishness, the answer to my torn nature.
Tom JunodRead
I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.
Tom JunodRead
The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.
Tom JunodRead
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