Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the treatment of others, suggesting that poor behavior toward prisoners reflects negatively on the authority figure.
Oscar Wilde's quote expresses a profound critique of power dynamics and responsibility. It implies that if a ruler, like Queen Victoria, treats her prisoners poorly, it calls into question her right to rule and govern. The statement suggests that leadership carries an obligation to act justly and humanely towards those under one's authority, and failing to do so undermines the legitimacy of that authority.
Themes
JusticeAuthorityPowerTreatmentLeadership
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the ethics of leadership in political science classes.
More from Oscar Wilde
All quotes →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.
Oscar WildeRead
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.
Oscar WildeRead
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar WildeRead
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
Oscar WildeRead
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Oscar WildeRead
Similar quotes
When man tries to imagine Paradise on earth, the immediate result is a very respectable Hell.
Paul ClaudelRead
I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.
Carl SandburgRead
All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.
Edward SaidRead
(About sweeping).... What he was in FACT doing was moving the dirt around with a broom, to give it a change of scenery and a chance to make new friends.
Terry PratchettRead
The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
Samuel BeckettRead
Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.
Arundhati RoyRead