They also chose someone who is capable of change and admitting error, two qualities one associates with wisdom.
~ Jennifer Senior / NYT
Seneca on Wrongdoing
“Wrongdoing has no harsher penalty than this: one offends oneself, and also one’s family and friends.”
~ Seneca
William Shakespeare on Flaws
No more be griev’d at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
~ William Shakespeare / Sonnet 35
Hannah Arendt on Spectating
As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
~ Hannah Arendt
Psalm 37 / Wrongdoers
Do not fret because of evildoers, Be not envious toward wrongdoers. For they will wither quickly like the grass.
~ Psalm 37: 1-2
Wendell Berry on Thomas Merton
“And I think Merton essentially was too humorous and too complete a man to have been down in the mouth about his sins all the time.”
~ Wendell Berry / New Yorker, July 14th, 2019
Lance Armstrong on Attitude
“Nobody would’ve come after me. I insist that it was the way I acted that was my undoing.”
~ Lance Armstrong
Seneca on Misdeeds
“Innocent persons sometimes perish; who would deny that? But the guilty perish more frequently.”
~ Seneca / Epistulae Morales AD Lucilium
William Shakespeare on Reputations
“Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.”
~ William Shakespeare
Hunter Thompson on Revenge
“There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation.”
~ Hunter Thompson
William Shakespeare on Wrongdoing
“An honest man he is, and hates the slime
That sticks on filthy deeds.”
~ William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare on Humanity
“How look I
That I should seem to lack humanity
So much as this fact comes to?”
~ William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare on Tyranny
“I knew him tyrannous, and tyrants’ fears
Decrease not, but grow faster than the years.”
~ William Shakespeare
Elbert Hubbard on Explaining
“Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.”
~ Elbert Hubbard
Jordan Peterson on Wrongdoing
“It’s a warning to me. I’m also saying: ‘Look the hell out because the chickens come home to roost.’ If I’ve learned one thing in 20 years of clinical practice, it’s that. I swear I’ve never seen anyone get away with anything in my whole life.”
~ Jordan Peterson