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c4bfc10
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You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.
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individuality
reading
morality
learning
life
self-righteousness
issues
sensitivity
novels
society
insight
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Azar Nafisi |
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c77a5af
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He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.
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self-righteousness
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a4b863f
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You're not exactly up for the Humanitarian of the Year award, so save your altruism for someone who can't see through you like cellophane.
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funny
cellophane
cellophane-wrap
hokey
humanitarian
jesus-complex
messiah-complex
pretentious
self-righteousness
pretend
see-through
fake
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Rebecca McNutt |
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a0546f8
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Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye,-however it may come, these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton.
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prejudice
identity
bourgeois-indulgence
intellectual-laziness
self-righteousness
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George Eliot |
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b597f18
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Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.
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self-righteousness
justification
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Max Frisch |
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fcbde60
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"Yet what moved Our Blessed Lord to invective was not badness but just such self-righteousness as this...He said that the harlots and the Quislings would enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the self-righteous and the smug. Concerning all those who endowed hospitals and libraries and public works, in order to have their names graven in stone before their fellow men, He said, "Amen I say to you, they have received their reward" (Matt. 6:2). They wanted no more than human glory, and they got it. Never once is Our Blessed Lord indignant against those who are already, in the eyes of society, below the level of law and respectability. He attacked only the sham indignation of those who dwelt more on the sin than the sinner and who felt pleasantly virtuous, because they had found someone more vicious than they. He would not condemn those whom society condemned; his severe words were for those who had sinned and had not been found out...He would not add His burden of accusation to those that had already been hurled against the winebibbers and the thieves, the cheap revolutionists, the streetwalkers, and the traitors. They were everybody's target, and everybody knew that they were wrong...And the people who chose to make war against Our Lord were never those whom society had labeled as sinners. Of those who sentenced Him to death, none had ever had a record in the police court, had ever been arrested, was ever commonly known to be fallen or weak. But among his friends, who sorrowed at His death, were coverts drawn from thieves and from prostitutes. Those who were aligned against Him were the nice people who stood high in the community--the worldly, prosperous people, the men of big business, the judges of law courts who governed by expediency, the "civic-minded" individuals whose true selfishness was veneered over with public generosity. Such men as these opposed him and sent Him to His death."
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self-righteousness
hypocrisy
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Fulton J. Sheen |
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8899c74
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"While we as people of God are certainly called to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, that whole "we're blessed to be a blessing" thing can still be kind of dangerous. It can be dangerous when we self-importantly place ourselves above the world, waiting to descend on those below so we can be the "blessing" they've been waiting for, like it or not."
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self-righteousness
service
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
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28484c9
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I know my Easts and Tom Brown, you see, and they're never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace and they can feel they are doing the right Christian thing and never mind the consequences to anyone else.
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george-macdonald-fraser
self-righteousness
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George MacDonald Fraser |
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48edd88
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My outrage feels empty because what I am desperate for is to speak the truth of my burden of sin and have Jesus take it from me, yet ranting about the system or about other people will always be my go-to instead. Because maybe if I show the right level of outrage, it'll make up for the fact that every single day of my life I have benefitted from the very same system that acquitted George Zimmerman. My opinions feel good until I crash from the self-righteous sugar high, then realize I'm still sick and hungry for a taste of mercy.
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outrage
self-righteousness
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |