Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Cohen

Moral innocence isn’t a shield here; it’s an indictment. Andrew Cohen’s line takes aim at the comfy modern pose of being “one of the good ones” in theory while remaining clumsy, uninformed, or passive in practice. He’s not arguing that intentions don’t matter. He’s arguing that intentions are cheap without competence, and that incompetence has consequences other people end up paying for.

The key move is the reframing of ignorance from a neutral absence of knowledge into an ethical choice. “To persist” is doing a lot of work: it implies access to information, the ability to learn, and the decision not to. That’s the subtext that sharpens the quote from self-help to moral pressure. Cohen is implicitly rejecting the cultural loophole where people excuse harm with “I didn’t mean it,” as if impact were an unfortunate side effect rather than the real measure of responsibility.

His insistence on “consider[ing] the effect” speaks to a writerly, civic sensibility: ethics isn’t just purity of motive; it’s attention, due diligence, and the humility to anticipate how good intentions can become paternalism, negligence, or performative care. The rhetoric has a quiet severity, too: “dishonorable” isn’t the language of therapy culture; it’s the language of accountability and reputation, as if he’s trying to restore social costs to willful obliviousness.

In context, it reads like a critique of armchair righteousness and a defense of informed action: if you have the power to affect others, you also inherit the obligation to understand what you’re doing. Ignorance stops being accidental the moment it becomes convenient.