Quote of the day–George Bernard Shaw

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

George Bernard Shaw
See also here, for further background on this phrase. The original was not “The road to hell is paved…” but Hell itself that was paved.
[I’m thinking gun control, TSA, socialized medicine, “affordable housing”, “hate speech” laws, rent control, the list is, for all practical purposes endless. See also New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.

I just bought Bat Out Of Hell so I could play it while posting this and doing my dry-fire practice.–Joe]

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3 thoughts on “Quote of the day–George Bernard Shaw

  1. It depends on how you define “good intentions.” Frankly, I don’t see much in the way of good intentions on the anti-RKBA side. They consistently lie about the facts and about the good guys (us). It’s pretty obvious that they don’t believe their own BS about guns being especially dangerous, so presumably they have ulterior motives.

  2. Depending on who it is they:

    1) Intend to create a great society where the good of the individual is outweighed, and rightly so, by the good of society (actual words told to me). Private guns promote and enable individualistic thinking which is counter productive to creating their utopia. The end justifies the means; or
    2) Use facts and reason only as a means to support their beliefs. They are incapable or unwilling to determine truth from falsity.

    Just because they have ulterior motives doesn’t mean they don’t have “good intentions”. I’m reminded of this quote by Adolf Hitler.

    I’m certain Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, and many of their countrymen, believed they had good intentions. Yet they sent millions (thousands in the case of Roosevelt) to concentration camps.

  3. “I’m certain Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, and many of their countrymen, believed they had good intentions.” They convinced themselves they had good intentions. There have been serial killers who had themselves convinced they were doing some sort of good or other too. The petty robber tells himself he is owed, and/or that his victims don’t deserve to keep what they have because they’re bad people, etc. Pol Pot has been quoted, in his last days, as saying he believed he had on balance done good for his country.

    I suppose the KKK thought similarly, but I also believe that in the final analysis is doesn’t matter one way or the other. Evil, or in these cases we can define it as “anti rights” (which I will go farther and define as anti American) is easy enough to recognize and easy enough to defeat if enough people have the honesty to call it what it is, and the will to snuff it out when it surfaces. That the perpetrators have rationalized their actions either this way or that becomes academic– something for the criminal psychologists to ponder.

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