“When someone gives you offense, it doesn't mean you have to take it.”
“Stop saying no offense,” I said, “when you say offensive things. It’s not a free pass.”
Source: Why We Broke Up
“Once you have met someone, you never really forget them.”
“She hugged the offender, and forgave the offense:
Sex to the last.”
Source: Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), Cymon and Iphigenia, Lines 367–368.
Source: 1850s, Practice in Christianity (September 1850), p. 115
Context: When in sickness I go to a physician, he may find it necessary to prescribe a very painful treatment-there is no self-contradiction in my submitting to it. No, but if on the other hand I suddenly find myself in trouble, an object of persecution, because, because I have gone to that physician: well, then then there is a self-contradiction. The physician has perhaps announced that he can help me with regard to the illness from which I suffer, and perhaps he can really do that-but there is an "aber" [but] that I had not thought of at all. The fact that I get involved with this physician, attach myself to him-that is what makes me an object of persecution; here is the possibility of offense. So also with Christianity. Now the issue is: will you be offended or will you believe. If you will believe, then you push through the possibility of offense and accept Christianity on any terms. So it goes; then forget the understanding; then you say: Whether it is a help or a torment, I want only one thing, I want to belong to Christ, I want to be a Christian.
“I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.”
“What was the use of writing if someone didn't read what you have to say?”
Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 21-29, p. 134
“If you want to control someone, all you have to do is to make them feel afraid.”
Variant: Fear again. If you want to control someone, all you have to do is to make them feel afraid.
Source: The Devil and Miss Prym
