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"A moral dilemma is equally absorbing whether the stakes are the destiny of nations or the happiness of one or two people - at the most."
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"Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk."
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Personal Development
"Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Prostitution' is a euphemism for rape incidents that the victim and the economy profits from."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Sin is the delusion of our feelings, while crime is the delusion of our actions."
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Personal Development
"We do what we enjoy, even if it is act of evil."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There never were greed and cunning in the world yet, that did not do too much, and overreach themselves. It is as certain as death."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven."
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Personal Development
"When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him."
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Personal Development
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"The ordinary people of Africa tended not to have room in their hearts for hatred. They were sometimes foolish, like people anywhere, but they did not bear grudges, as Mr Mandela had shown the world."
Society
"That was what counted, she told herself: those unexpected moments of appreciation, unanticipated glimpses of beauty or kindness - any of the things that attached us to this world, that made us forget, even for a moment, its pain and its transience."
Life
"And the memory made her humble, for we should not forget what it is to be young and to have ideas and attitudes that may later seem so fanciful."
Reflection
"International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky."
Society
"People don't talk about mercy very much these days-it has a rather old-fashioned ring to it. but it exists and its power is quite extraordinary."
Ethics
"There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride."
Emotion
"There were some people, it seemed, who were incapable of being pleasant about anything. Of course, the cars that such people drove tended to be difficult as well. Nice cars have nice drivers; bad cars have bad drivers. A person's gearbox revealed everything that you could want to know about that person, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni."
Psychology
"Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave to it."
Morality
"A photograph may speak to the photographer's envy or disappointment just as much as it may reveal his anger or disapproval. And even if a photograph records a joyous occasion, behind it there may still be more than a small measure of heartbreak on the part of the photographer. A small measure of heartbreak? One might think such a thing is impossible--if your heart is broken, then surely it is broken completely. Yet the truth is that we can live with a minor fault-line in the heart--most of us do, in one way or another."
Art
"Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down-or up, I suppose-replacing other people in the process."
History
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