“Instead of making a genuine point, it's now good enough to repeat any ribald story without a thought for whether it's even true.”

— Lindsey Davis , book Last Act in Palmyra

Last Act in Palmyra
Context: The new "humour", if you can call it that, is pure malicious gossip. Instead of making a genuine point, it's now good enough to repeat any ribald story without a thought for whether it's even true.

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Lindsey Davis 67

English novelist 1949

Lindsey Davis book Last Act in Palmyra

Last Act in Palmyra (1994)

“Whether you point to a little stalk or a great pillar, a leper or the beautiful Hsi-shih, things ribald and shady or things grotesque and strange, the Way makes them all into one.”

Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher

Ch. 2 (tr. Burton Watson, 1964, p. 41)
Context: Whether you point to a little stalk or a great pillar, a leper or the beautiful Hsi-shih, things ribald and shady or things grotesque and strange, the Way makes them all into one. Their dividedness is their completeness; their completeness is their impairment. No thing is either complete or impaired, but all are made into one again. Only the man of far-reaching vision knows how to make them into one. So he has no use [for categories], but relegates all to the constant. The constant is the useful; the useful is the passable; the passable is the successful; and with success, all is accomplished. He relies upon this alone, relies upon it and does not know he is doing so. This is called the Way.

“What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.”

Bernhard Schlink book The Reader

Source: The Reader

“I believe in the goodness of fellow human beings. We have a true desire for greatness and genuine good intention to be helpful to others. That's enough. Change is possible.”

Ilchi Lee (1950) South Korean businessman

Source: Change: Realizing Your Greatest Potential

“Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.”

Stefan Zweig book The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

“The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Speech in the House of Representatives (20 June 1848)
1840s
Context: The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.