"Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them"
About this Quote
Eliot’s line is a small act of moral vandalism: it rips the mask off “good intentions” and shows the face underneath is usually vanity. The target isn’t cartoonish evil. It’s the respectable impulse to matter, to be seen as consequential, to turn the world into a stage where one’s significance can be performed. That’s why the sentence turns on “feel important” rather than “be important.” The damage comes from the craving, not the competence.
The subtext is chillingly modern: harm isn’t always a byproduct; it’s often a rounding error. “They don’t mean to do harm” grants the alibi we love to give ourselves, then Eliot yanks it away with the brutal follow-up: “the harm does not interest them.” Indifference, not malice, is the engine. Once your attention is captured by your own self-image, other people’s costs become background noise. You can bulldoze lives while narrating yourself as a builder.
Context matters: Eliot wrote as an early-20th-century diagnostician of spiritual and social exhaustion, watching bureaucracies, institutions, and ideologies swell in the wake of industrial modernity and world war. In that landscape, the most dangerous actors weren’t necessarily fanatics; they were functionaries, patrons, reformers, tastemakers - anyone for whom “doing good” could double as a career of self-importance. The quote works because it refuses melodrama. It’s an ethics of attention: if harm doesn’t hold your gaze, you’ll keep producing it, calmly, even proudly.
The subtext is chillingly modern: harm isn’t always a byproduct; it’s often a rounding error. “They don’t mean to do harm” grants the alibi we love to give ourselves, then Eliot yanks it away with the brutal follow-up: “the harm does not interest them.” Indifference, not malice, is the engine. Once your attention is captured by your own self-image, other people’s costs become background noise. You can bulldoze lives while narrating yourself as a builder.
Context matters: Eliot wrote as an early-20th-century diagnostician of spiritual and social exhaustion, watching bureaucracies, institutions, and ideologies swell in the wake of industrial modernity and world war. In that landscape, the most dangerous actors weren’t necessarily fanatics; they were functionaries, patrons, reformers, tastemakers - anyone for whom “doing good” could double as a career of self-importance. The quote works because it refuses melodrama. It’s an ethics of attention: if harm doesn’t hold your gaze, you’ll keep producing it, calmly, even proudly.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
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