Joshua

“Nor should you forget that although it's easy to distinguish between what is said in jest and what in earnest, when it comes to people who mean so much to us that our lives depend on them, then it isn't so easy after all, the risk is so great it turns our eyes into microscopes, and once equipped with those it's impossible to distinguish anything.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“What makes people morally dissatisfied (and this is a dissatisfaction upon which they pride themselves) is that they do not see the present as measuring up to the goals they hold as right and good. This applies especially to contemporary ideal models of political institutions—thus contrasting the way things are with the way they ought to be.
Here it is not the particular interest, not the passion, that demands to be satisfied, but rather the demands of Reason, Justice, and Freedom. And once it is furnished with this title, the demand becomes haughty, and it is not only dissatisfied (all too easily) with world conditions, but even rebels against them.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History

“That is the danger of having principles. In politics, principle is like a sword aimed at the heart. Far better, one might be forgiven for thinking, for a lord to have no principles than to risk that he might fall on that sword. The principled man simply has more to lose. It is what makes them such fabulous villains.”
― Christopher Ruocchio

“There is no useful virtue which has not some alloy of vice, and hardly any vice, if any, which carries not with it a little dash of virtue; virtue and vice are like life and death, or mind and matter--things which cannot exist without being qualified by their opposite.”
― Samuel Butler