"Be good. Do good"
About this Quote
Two clipped commands, no excuses, no loopholes: "Be good. Do good". Heroux writes like someone allergic to moral grandstanding. The sentence refuses the cozy escape hatches we build around ethics - the idea that good intentions count, or that virtue is a private feeling you can stockpile without consequence.
The first verb, "Be", targets character: the interior habits that make cruelty easy or restraint possible. It’s a call to cultivate the kind of person who doesn’t need constant supervision to act decently. The second verb, "Do", yanks morality out of the soul and into the street. Goodness, Heroux implies, is not a mood or an identity; it’s measurable in what you choose when it costs time, money, comfort, reputation.
The genius is the structure. By splitting being from doing, he highlights a modern hypocrisy: we love the aesthetics of goodness (the self-image, the signaling, the posture) and neglect the work of it. But he also cuts against the opposite mistake - performative altruism that’s unmoored from integrity, where "doing good" becomes branding.
Context matters here. A writer who lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the long ideological chill of the Cold War would have seen how quickly civilized people outsource conscience to institutions, slogans, and crowds. Heroux’s minimalism is a kind of moral emergency kit: small enough to carry anywhere, blunt enough to survive an era of rationalizations.
The first verb, "Be", targets character: the interior habits that make cruelty easy or restraint possible. It’s a call to cultivate the kind of person who doesn’t need constant supervision to act decently. The second verb, "Do", yanks morality out of the soul and into the street. Goodness, Heroux implies, is not a mood or an identity; it’s measurable in what you choose when it costs time, money, comfort, reputation.
The genius is the structure. By splitting being from doing, he highlights a modern hypocrisy: we love the aesthetics of goodness (the self-image, the signaling, the posture) and neglect the work of it. But he also cuts against the opposite mistake - performative altruism that’s unmoored from integrity, where "doing good" becomes branding.
Context matters here. A writer who lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the long ideological chill of the Cold War would have seen how quickly civilized people outsource conscience to institutions, slogans, and crowds. Heroux’s minimalism is a kind of moral emergency kit: small enough to carry anywhere, blunt enough to survive an era of rationalizations.
Quote Details
| Topic | Kindness |
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