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Quote by Dennis Prager

“Suffering is no guarantee of empathy and the decent behavior it engenders. When people emerge from pain and oppression, they have two options: they can use their anger over their suffering to legitimize their oppression of others; or they can use the memory of their pain to empathize with others. Suffering ennobles only those who want to be ennobled by it.”

Quote by Dennis Prager

Book:The Rational Bible: Exodus
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The Rational Bible: Exodus

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Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager is a well-known radio host and author, born on August 2, 1948. He has made substantial contributions to the field of radio broadcasting, particularly known for his conservative political and social commentary. Prager has a large following. more

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“The philosopher and ethicist Jonathan Glover reports the story of Odilo Globocnik, the Nazi SS leader in Lublin, Poland, who recalled an incident in which he expressed to another Nazi officer, a Major Hofle, how much it bothered him to think about the Polish children freezing to death while being transported by the Nazis from Lublin to Warsaw. He could not look at these young children without thinking of his own three-year-old niece. Hofle, he recalled, looked at me 'like [I was] an idiot.' Sometime later, Hofle’s own baby twins died of diphtheria and, at the cemetery, he cried out that it was heaven’s punishment for his misdeeds.”

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Book:The Rational Bible: Exodus
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“It would be futile to delude ourselves that at present, readers find every pathography unsavory. This attitude is excused with the reproach that from a pathographic elaboration of a great man one never obtains an understanding of his importance and his attainments, that it is therefore useless mischief to study in him things which could just as well be found in the first comer. However, this criticism is so clearly unjust that it can only be grasped when viewed as a pretext and a disguise for something. As a matter of fact pathography does not aim at making comprehensible the attainments of the great man; no one should really be blamed for not doing something which one never promised. The real motives for the opposition are quite different. One finds them when one bears in mind that biographers are fixed on their heroes in quite a peculiar manner. Frequently they take the hero as the object of study because, for reasons of their personal emotional life, they bear him a special affection from the very outset. They then devote themselves to a work of idealization which strives to enroll the great men among their infantile models, and to revive through him, as it were, the infantile conception of the father. For the sake of this wish they wipe out the individual features in his physiognomy, they rub out the traces of his life's struggle with inner and outer resistances, and do not tolerate in him anything of human weakness or imperfection; they then give us a cold, strange, ideal form instead of the man to whom we could feel distantly related. It is to be regretted that they do this, for they thereby sacrifice the truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasies they let slip the opportunity to penetrate into the most attractive secrets of human nature.”

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Book:Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood
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