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About this quote

What does it mean?
Weak minds push necessary reforms too far until they need fixing.
In plain terms
Weak people make reforms go too far and need more reform.
What can you take from it?
Balance is key in reform efforts.

Where it applies

  • politics
  • social change
  • management

Putting it to work

  • implement change
  • avoid excess
  • evaluate progress

Questions to consider

  • How much change is too much?
  • Who drives reform?

Another view

It assumes all excess comes from weak minds.

More from Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  1. Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.

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  2. Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.

    Permalink to quote #100
  3. The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize t…

    Permalink to quote #97

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