Quote of the Week
We have a challenging topic for you today! The Greek dramatist Sophocles, famous for plays like Oedipus the King, once wrote this:
“The end excuses any evil. “
Today, we sometimes say “the end justifies the mean”, which means the same thing.
This is a difficult quote to agree with, but for some practical-minded people, maybe it makes sense. If we can do something good, if we can help people or make the world a better place to live, then maybe it IS good if we do some evil things along the way. Well, I’m not sure I agree with that. Do you?
Nafis Said,
May 1, 2008 @ 9:51 pm
Dear Joe,
This quotation is ambigous for me yet.I do not know what “the end” means here.Is it goal and intented results? if it means goal, why do you explain it as somthing good? goal can be many things including bad things such as war, lying, betray and so on.
I read more about the meaning of this statment and i understood that it has many meaning. which of those meaning do you consider?
would you explain more about it? I am really thinking about it to write something. It is a really challenging topic and I really LOVE it.
I so appreciate that in advance.
teacherjoe Said,
May 2, 2008 @ 2:00 am
“The end” really means “the final result”. A goal is what we hope for, what we plan for, even if we do not succeed. A result is what we actually get, whether we planned for it as a goal or not. One example from history is the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan in World War II. The goal was probably to win the war. (That is what armies try to do in a war -win.) However, after the war, many people tried to justify using such deadly weapons that killed so many innocent people by saying that the end of the war saved so many lives. They say that the result, a quick end to a bloody war, justified the atomic means.
A lot of violence in our world is justified by the claim that we are trying to help people. So we could debate this topic for a long, long time. In fact, that was my purpose in choosing this topic - to encourage discussion. OUR goal here, after all, is to practice English. I think the end (the result) was very little discussion, so maybe I was not justified in choosing such a difficult topic! (^_*)
Nafis Said,
May 2, 2008 @ 3:26 am
And now my answer to this quotation is, that everything depends on the end. If we really want to help people, we can do some evil things.For example, in “Braveheart” movie, William Wallace, the main hero, fought with the brutal British king.He killed the king and saved many people from his brutal dominent.Not only he saved people but also he caved his good reputation throughout the history.His action was really pure and the cosmic supported his beliefs.
But some polititians are using this quotation in order to achieve their evil goals and then, cosmic does not support their evil action.The world has a really simple proved law.The law is every action has reaction in opposite direction.So, based on this law, every bad action has a bad reaction and one can not be successful for a long-term time. Cosmic is based on “love” and does not support anything but it.If it had supported any evil things, we ,today, would not blame Hitlers, Changizkhan and etc.
Because our end in this blog is to learn English and this is a really GREAT end and it is PURE Awareness.So, we can justify to choose this GREAT Topic.