We evaluate others with a Godlike justice, but we want them to evaluate us with a Godlike compassion.
Interpretation
We judge others harshly while expecting them to be kind to us.
This quote by Sydney J. Harris reflects the inherent human tendency to hold others to very high standards of accountability and justice, while simultaneously desiring understanding, forgiveness, and compassion for ourselves. It points out the hypocrisy in human relationships where we easily criticize and evaluate others but wish to escape the same scrutiny, highlighting the complexity of human judgment and empathy.
In practice
In a discussion about fairness in society, this quote can serve to remind individuals to reflect on their own biases.
A person is either himself or not himself; is either rooted in his existence or is a fabrication; has either found his humanhood or is still playing with masks and roles and status symbols. And nobody is more aware of this difference (although unconsciously) than a child. Only an authentic person can evoke a good response in the core of the other person; only person is resonant to person.
The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.
Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
"Terrorism" is what we call the violence of the weak, and we condemn it; "war" is what we call the violence of the strong, and we glorify it.
At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teachβit is to inspire the desire for learning. Once a student's mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.
You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.
The man who lives in division is living in death. He cannot find himself because he is lost; he has ceased to be a reality. The person he believes himself to be is a bad dream.
We should make the case for the things we love, even if we think that people will misunderstand them. That is why people defend the U.S. Constitution, even though so few really understand the subtle thinking embodied in that document.
But what Freud showed us⦠was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.
Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.
They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.
..the United States is subject to the scrutiny of a candid world ... what the United States does, for good or for ill, continues to be watched by the international community, in particular by organizations concerned with the advancement of the rule of law and respect for human dignity.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.