The trouble with righting some wrongs is that it makes the remaining ones seem even more unbearable.
A. A. GillRead
America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.
Interpretation
What this quote means
America redefined civilization rather than evading it.
A. A. Gill's quote suggests that America did not flee from the concept of civilization but instead transformed it into something new and innovative. This implies that the American experience and its cultural evolution have brought forth alternative understandings and expressions of civilization, extending the boundaries of what civilization entails.
Themes
CivilizationAmericaChangeCultureInnovation
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on cultural transformation, the quote can illustrate how America has evolved societal norms.
More from A. A. Gill
All quotes →If the world were to end tomorrow and we could choose to save only one thing as the explanation and memorial to who we were, then we couldn't do better than the Natural History Museum, although it wouldn't contain a single human. The systematic Linnean order, the vast inquisitiveness and range of collated knowledge and beauty would tell all that is the best of us.
A. A. GillRead
Sport is how poor kids from poor countries pass through the eye of the needle to riches and recognition.
A. A. GillRead
Being able to afford everything you desire is not, by any means, the worst thing that can happen to you. But, depressingly, and more profoundly, neither is it the best.
A. A. GillRead
Celebrity is a national drama whose characters' parts and plots are written by the tabloids, gossip columnists, websites and interactive buttons. The famous don't actually have to turn up to their own lives at all.
A. A. GillRead
Trying to learn to be a good man is like learning to play tennis against a wall. You are only a good man - a competent, capable, interesting and lovable man - when you're doing it for, or with, other people.
A. A. GillRead
Similar quotes
Indeed, what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish it. It is in such cases that the true genius lurking behind many of our laws stands revealed. The idea of a victimless crime is nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin.
Sam HarrisRead
Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.
James BaldwinRead
Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil; there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend to only one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.
John Stuart MillRead
When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
Charity is only a waystation on the road to justice.
William Sloane CoffinRead
There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.
Thomas Babington MacaulayRead