Past Wrongs Quotes

Distant wrongs, she thought: an interesting issue in moral philosophy. Do past wrongs seem less wrong to us simply because they are less vivid? ~ Alexander McCall Smith

I do not think it can be disputed that while we lay heavy stress on faith (coming to Christ, trusting His promises, believing that God knows what He is doing with our lives, and hoping for heaven), we touch very lightly on repentance (binding one's conscience to God's moral law, confessing and forsaking one's sins, making restitution for past wrongs, grieving before God at the dishonor one's sins have done Him, and forming a game plan for holy living). ~ J.I. Packer

It is unfortunate that in most cases when the sins of the father fall on the son it is because unlike God, people refuse to forgive and forget and heap past wrongs upon innocent generations. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Perhaps, if we don't always have a conscious conscience, we have a subliminal one, from which the memory of past wrongs is not so easily erased. ~ Eva Hoffman

No one punishes the evil-doer under the notion, or for the reason, that he has done wrong
only the unreasonable fury of a beast acts in that way. But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong, for that which is done cannot be undone, but he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again. ~ Plato

Some suffering is given in order to chastise and correct a person for wrongful patterns of life (as in the case of Jonah imperiled by the storm), some suffering is given not to correct past wrongs but to prevent future ones (as in the case of Joseph sold into slavery), and some suffering has no purpose other than to lead a person to love God more ardently for himself alone and so discover the ultimate peace and freedom. ~ Timothy Keller

But it is hazardous and, I believe, counterproductive to become frozen in time by an obsession with past wrongs and errors. ~ George S. McGovern

It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable ... What was worse, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?
So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck. ~ Amy Tan

It doesn't matter how many years go by, how much therapy I embark on, how much I try to achieve that elusive thing known as perspective, which is supposed to put all past wrongs into their rightful and diminished place, that happy place where all the talk is of lessons learned and inner peace. No one will ever understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don't need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them. They are front and center, they are going on right now. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

Our Christian habit is to bewail the world's deteriorating standards with an air of rather self-righteous dismay. We criticize its violence, dishonesty, immorality, disregard for human life, and materialistic greed.

"The world is going down the drain," we say with a shrug. But whose fault is it? Who is to blame? Let me put it like this. If the house is dark when nightfall comes, there is no sense in blaming the house; that is what happens when the sun goes down. The question to ask is "Where is the light?"

Similarly, if the meat goes bad and becomes inedible, there is no sense in blaming the meat; that is what happens when bacteria are left alone to breed. The question to ask is "Where is the salt?"

Just so, if society deteriorates and its standards decline until it becomes like a dark night or a stinking fish, there is no sense in blaming society; that is what happens when fallen men and women are left to themselves, and human selfishness is unchecked.

The question to ask is "Where is the Church? Why are the salt and light of Jesus Christ not permeating and changing our society?" It is sheer hypocrisy on our part to raise our eyebrows, shrug our shoulders, or wring our hands. The Lord Jesus told us to be the world's salt and light. If therefore darkness and rottenness abound, it is largely our fault and we must accept the blame.--John Stott (Human Rights and Human Wrongs) ~ Richard Stearns

The individual who cultivates grievances, and who is perpetually exacting explanations of his assumed wrongs, can only be ignored, and left to the education of time and of development ... One does not argue or contend with the foul miasma that settles over stagnant water; one leaves it and climbs to a higher region, where the air is pure and the sunshine fair. ~ Lilian Whiting

The hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

Take your duty, and be strong in it, as God will make you strong. The harder it is, the stronger in fact you will be. Understand, also, that the great question here is, not what you will get, but what you will become. The greatest wealth you can ever get will be in yourself. Take your burdens and troubles and losses and wrongs, if come they must and will, as your opportunity, knowing that God has girded you for greater things than these. ~ Horace Bushnell

I often hear people say that they read to escape reality, but I believe that what they're really doing is reading to find reason for hope, to find strength. While a bad book leaves readers with a sense of hopelessness and despair, a good novel, through stories of values realized, of wrongs righted, can bring to readers a connection to the wonder of life. A good novel shows how life can and ought to be lived. It not only entertains but energizes and uplifts readers. ~ Terry Goodkind

I do not mean to say that this general government is charged with the duty of redressing or preventing all the wrongs in the world; but I do think that it is charged with the duty of preventing and redressing all wrongs which are wrongs to itself. ~ Abraham Lincoln

To the wrongs that need resistance,
To the right that needs assistance,
To the future in the distance,
Give yourselves. ~ Carrie Chapman Catt

It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that what we call the rights of men become turbulent and dangerous. ~ James Russell Lowell

I believe that movements to suppress wrongs can be carried out under the protection of our flag. ~ Mary Harris Jones

Self-evident, Sharif Basha thinks, laying down his pen. So self-evident as to be hardly worth saying. But Anna does not think so. Anna, when she sees a wrong, she cannot rest until it has been put right. Besides, she wants to make him happy. Not just happy at home, but happy altogether. He knows she imagines a day when the shadow within which their life together has been lived will be lifted. And she still has confidence in public opinion; that if only people can be made to see, to understand - then wrongs can be undone, and history set on a different course. ~ Ahdaf Soueif

I prophesy in the name of the Lord God of Israel, unless the United States redress the wrongs committed upon the Saints in the state of Missouri and punish the crimes committed by her officers that in a few years the government will be utterly overthrown and wasted, and there will not be so much as a potsherd left ... ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

Perhaps the fact that I am not a Radical or a believer in the all powerful ballot for women to right her wrongs and that I do notscorn womanly duties, but claim it as a privilege to clean up and sort of supervise the room and sew things, etc., is winning me stronger allies than anything else. ~ Ellen Swallow Richards

Righteous anger could be a valuable tool, but it needed to be rational anger. Anger against evil. Anger against wrongs. It had to be wielded the same way any weapon was wielded. It needed to be wielded with reasoned wisdom tempered with maturity. It had to be respected for the damage it could do not only to evil, but also to the innocent. He knew that sometimes ability grew faster than the sense to know when not to use it, like a young man who grew muscles before growing wise enough not to be easily provoked into using them. ~ Terry Goodkind

He was ... a strange blending of Puritan and Cavalier, with a touch of the ancient philosopher, and more than a touch of the pagan ... A hunger in his soul drove him on and on, an urge to right all wrongs, protect all weaker things ... Wayward and restless as the wind, he was consistent in only one respect - he was true to his ideals of justice and right. Such was Solomon Kane. ~ Robert E. Howard

Adulthood is an attempt to become the antithesis of the wounded child within us. ~ Stewart Stafford

The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right. ~ John Muir

The problem with today's culture is that we have too many rights and not enough wrongs. ~ Ron Brackin

If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent. ~ Thomas Paine

When something
needs to be done in the world
to rectify the wrongs,
if one is really concerned
with benefiting others,
one needs to be
engaged, involved.
This is action out of compassion. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

[I]n America,
wrongs can be righted,
warriors can wear skirts and blouses,
and the bravest hearts
may beat in girls
only five feet tall. ~ Michelle Markel

Every star knows you step on some toes to get where you're going - and some more after you get there. Nobody means to hurt anybody else, it just happens. You always keep saying in the back of your mind that one day you will be able to right all the wrongs. That someday almost never comes. ~ Jayne Mansfield

We should all do something to right the wrongs that we see and not just complain about them. ~ Jackie Kennedy

The stars in the sky
Unhidden by night
Souls of our loved ones
Guide us by sight
But when dawn breaks
Bringing day's light
Remain in our hearts
And all wrongs become right;
I'll see you in the night. ~ Keri Lake

Selfishness is the most constant of human motives. Patriotism, humanity, or the love of God may lead to sporadic outbursts sweep away the heaped-up wrongs of centuries; but they languish at times, while the love of self works on ceaselessly, unwearyingly,burrowing always at the very root of life, and heaping up fresh wrongs for other centuries to sweep away. ~ Charles W. Chesnutt

yet religion itself, any religion, keeps a person on the right path. Not the fear of God, but upholding your own sense of honour and obeying your own conscience. How noble and good everyone could be if, at the end of each day, they were to review their own behaviour and weigh up the rights and wrongs. They would automatically try to do better at the start of each new day and, after a while, would certainly accomplish a great deal. Everyone is welcome to this prescription; it costs nothing and is definitely useful. Those who don't know will have to find out by experience that 'a quiet conscience gives you strength'! ~ Anne Frank

My best friend is he who rights my wrongs or reproaches my mistakes. ~ Jose De San Martin

I see what you think you mean," said the magician, "but you are wrong. There is no excuse for war, none whatever, and whatever wrong which your nation might be doing to mine-short of war-my nation would be in the wrong if I started a war so as to redress it. A murderer, for instance, is not allowed to plead that his victim was rich and oppresing hhim, so why should a nation be allowed to? Wrongs have to be redressed by reason, not force. ~ T.H. White

The remedy for wrongs is to forget them. ~ Publilius Syrus

In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is equalized with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that's in the long run. We must live in the short run and matters are often unjust there. The compensating for us of the universe makes all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process. ~ Michael Connelly

You give me offense, and I take it. I take offense to the fact that you would stand here and belittle Simone's beliefs and her work to correct what she feels are grave wrongs when you take no action to fight for your beliefs. It is one thing to compare or even belittle sacred truths when both parties are working toward rectifying wrongs. But it is quite another to rail against a person who is doing something when you do nothing. ~ Penny Reid

Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears; O life, no life, but lively form of death; Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs. ~ Thomas Kyd

That's the reason forgiveness is divine. 'Cause someone wrongs us, we live with that wrong right alongside them, but it's us who has to find the strength to let them off the hook. If they work for it, ask for it, only you have the power to offer it to them so their soul can be less heavy. And the right thing to do is use that power. ~ Kristen Ashley

She has been unkind to you, no doubt; because you see, she dislikes your cast of character, as Miss Scatcherd does mine; but how minutely you remember all she has done and said to you! What a singularly deep impression her injustice seems to have made on your heart! No ill-usage so brands its record on my feelings. Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs. We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain, - the impalpable principle of light and thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire the creature: whence it came it will return; perhaps again to be communicated to some being higher than man - perhaps to pass through gradations of glory, from the pale human soul to brighten to the seraph! ... ~ Charlotte Bronte

To bear with patience wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection, but to bear with patience wrongs done to someone else is a mark of imperfection and even of actual sin. ~ Thomas Aquinas

What armies and how much of war I have seen, what thousands of marching troops, what fields of slain, what prisons, what hospitals, what ruins, what cities in ashes, what hunger and nakedness, what orphanages, what widowhood, what wrongs and what vengeance. ~ Clara Barton

It is easy to be pessimistic. These are extraordinarily difficult times, and the collective psyche is teetering. But we are closer to righting the wrongs that got us into this economic mess than most of us believe. ~ Mark Zandi

Returning to the arched window, she lifted her eyes- scowling, poor dim-sighted Hepzibah, in the face of heaven!- and strove hard to send up a prayer through the dense grey pavement of clouds. Those mists had gathered , as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble, doubt, confusion, and chill indifference, between earth and the better regions. Her faith was too weak; the prayer to heavy to be thus uplifted. It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart. It smote her with the wretched conviction that Providence intermeddled not in these petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed it's justice , and it's mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. It's vastness made it nothing. But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of God's care and pity for every separate need ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Here an attempt is made to explain suffering: the outcaste of traditional Hinduism is held to deserve his fetched fate; it is a punishment for the wrongs he did in a previous life. ~ Walter Kaufmann

The sinner sins against himself; the wrongdoer wrongs himself, becoming the worse by his own action. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Screaming at misguided people, Lincoln believed, was not the way to correct their wrongs. As he put it later, you won people to your side through "persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion," making friends with them, appealing to their reason, gently telling them that they were only hurting themselves by their follies. For it was "an old true maxim," Lincoln contended, "that a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall." But if you assailed, damned, and vilified the misled, they would shut you off and lash back. ~ Stephen B. Oates

The politics of identity is nothing new, certainly on the American right. What was astonishing during the Reagan Dispensation was the development of a left-wing version of it that became the de facto creed of two generations of liberal politicians, professors, schoolteachers, journalists, movement activists, and officials of the Democratic Party. This was not a historical accident. For the fascination, and then obsession, with identity did not challenge the fundamental principle of Reaganism. It reinforced that principle: individualism. Identity politics on the left was at first about large classes of people -- African-Americans, women -- seeking to redress major historical wrongs by mobilizing and then working through our political institutions to secure their rights. But by the 1980s it had given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition that is now cultivated in our colleges and universities. The main result has been to turn young people back onto themselves, rather than turning them toward the wider world. It has left them unprepared to think about the common good and what must be done practically to secure it -- especially the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common effort. Every advance of liberal identity consciousness has marked a retreat of liberal political consciousness. Without which no vision of America's future can be imagined. ~ Mark Lilla

Just remember human beings have always managed to find the greatest strength within themselves during the darkest hours. When faced with the worst horrors the world has to offer, a person either cracks and succumbs to the ugliness, or they salvage the inner core of who they are and fight to right wrongs. ~ Cat Winters

Cruelty to animals is cruelty and a vile thing; but cruelty to a man is not cruelty, it is treason. Tyranny over a man is not tyranny, it is rebellion, for man is royal. Now, the practical weakness of the vast mass of modern pity for the poor and the oppressed is precisely that it is merely pity; the pity is pitiful, but not respectful. Men feel that the cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is injustice to equals; nay, it is treachery to comrades. This dark scientific pity, this brutal pity, has an elemental sincerity of its own; but it is entirely useless for all ends of social reform. Democracy swept Europe with the sabre when it was founded upon the Rights of Man. It has done literally nothing at all since it has been founded only upon the wrongs of man. Or, more strictly speaking, its recent failure has been due to its not admitting the existence of any rights, or wrongs, or indeed of any humanity. Evolution (the sinister enemy of revolution) does not especially deny the existence of God; what it does deny is the existence of man. And all the despair about the poor, and the cold and repugnant pity for them, has been largely due to the vague sense that they have literally relapsed into the state of the lower animals. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Are there any Nazis left that I could hunt down and bring to justice?" Augustus asked while we leaned over the vitrines reading Otto's letters and the gutting replies that no, no one had seen his children after the liberation.

"I think they're all dead. But it's not like the Nazis had a monopoly on evil."

"True," he said. "That's what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team up and be this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered."

Although it was his dream and not mine, I indulged it. He'd indulged mine, after all. "Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon," I said.

"The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself," he said.

"And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us."

"They will robot-laugh at our courageous folly," he said. "But something in their iron robot hearts will yearn to have lived and died as we did: on the hero's errand. ~ John Green

I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,
Those undreamt accidents that have made me
Seeing that Fame has perished this long while,
Being but a part of ancient ceremony
Notorious, till all my priceless things
Are but a post the passing dogs defile. ~ William Butler Yeats

She has a fine genius for poetry, combined with real business earnestness, and "goes in"
to use an expression of Alfred's
for Woman's mission, Woman's rights, Woman's wrongs, and everything that is woman's with a capital W, or is not and ought to be, or is and ought not to be. "Most praiseworthy, my dear, and Heaven prosper you!" I whispered to her on the first night of my taking leave of her at the Picture-Room door, "but don't overdo it. And in respect of the great necessity there is, my darling, for more employments being within the reach of Woman than our civilisation has as yet assigned to her, don't fly at the unfortunate men, even those men who are at first sight in your way, as if they were the natural oppressors of your sex; for, trust me, Belinda, they do sometimes spend their wages among wives and daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts, and grandmothers; and the play is, really, not ALL Wolf and Red Riding-Hood, but has other parts in it." However, I digress. ~ Charles Dickens

It always has been so. The grievances of those who have got power, commands a great deal of attention; but the wrongs and the grievances of those people who have no power at all are apt to be absolutely ignored. That is the history of humanity right from the beginning. ~ Various

Praise, Praise, Praise a child for the good they commit and the wrongs they rectify. ~ Asa Don Brown

Two wrongs don't make a right.
No, but three will get you back on the freeway! ~ Rita Mae Brown