We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
Angela DavisRead
I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities.
Interpretation
We have a duty to acknowledge and appreciate those who have enabled our success.
In this quote, Angela Davis emphasizes the importance of recognizing the contributions of others who have paved the way for our opportunities. She highlights a collective responsibility to honor and support the ones whose sacrifices and efforts have allowed us to thrive and succeed, urging individuals to act with awareness and gratitude towards their communities and predecessors.
In practice
During a graduation speech, to remind students to acknowledge their mentors.
We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.
Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital.
Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.
Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.
It's true that it's within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it's not going to solve the problems
Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root.'
And much as Wine has played the Infidel, And robbed me of my Robe of Honor Well, I often wonder what the Vintners buy One half so precious as the stuff they sell.
Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
If you look at the developments in the international scene over the past many years, we haven't been able to resolve many problems and many crises, because we have approached them from a zero-sum perspective. My gain has always been defined as somebody else's loss, and through that, we never resolve problems.
The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that's making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?
Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed.
Nothing will make me change my principles. Even with the knife at my neck I shall still declare, up to this day, the poor have done everything; it is time for the rich to take their turn... The selfish people, the young idlers, must be made useful, whether they like it or not, and some respite be procured for the useful and respectable worker.
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