Sign Up
Enter your name and email to receive updates on all Explorer Poet content
These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
And so tell me-what bad is there that one cannot teach a nation? Or people? Or all humanity?
… among both prison and camp jailers it was possible to find human beings. Every prisoner encountered more than one in his career. In an officer it was virtually impossible. This, properly speaking. was the universal law of the inverse ratio between social position and humaneness.
But no! Let those who saw them show them. I didn't see them. I have already deduced the generalized judgment that a camp keeper could not be a decent person— either he had to change direction or they got rid of him.
But no! Let those who saw them show them. I didn't see them. I have already deduced the generalized judgment that a camp keeper could not be a decent person— either he had to change direction or they got rid of him.
We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the "weakness of indoctrinational work," that they are growing up "indifferent." Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity. It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
Oh, you corrupters of young souls! How prosperously you are living out your lives! You are never going to have to stand up somewhere, blushing and tongue-tied, and confess what slops you poured over souls!
Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.
Enter your name and email to receive updates on all Explorer Poet content