Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
Interpretation
Oscar Wilde suggests that wealth inequality leads to unfair happiness among individuals.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde critiques the social and economic disparities that allow some wealthy individuals, particularly bachelors, to enjoy an elevated level of happiness while others suffer from poverty and hardship. By proposing a heavy tax on rich bachelors, he advocates for a more equitable distribution of wealth that would promote a fairer society, where no individual should feel excessively happy while others are left struggling.
In practice
In a speech advocating for economic reform, one might quote Wilde to highlight the need for fair taxation.
Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.
For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and tho' himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his cotemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.
For knowing is spoken of in three ways: it may be either universal knowledge or knowledge proper to the matter in hand or actualising such knowledge; consequently three kinds of error also are possible.
This personal freedom to think and feel and speak authentically and to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human.
Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation. [However disappointment can always be removed if we remember it could have turned out worse.]
This is the reason we cannot complain of life: it keeps no one against his will.
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