There is...a spiritual hunger in the world today and it cannot be satisfied...by better cars on longer credit terms.
Adlai E. StevensonRead
Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short, of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal.
Interpretation
This quote critiques communism as a system that suppresses individuality and enforces conformity through tyranny.
Adlai E. Stevenson emphasizes that communism not only stifles personal freedom and individuality but also establishes a pervasive form of oppression that seeks to dominate every aspect of life. He conveys the idea that such a system ultimately undermines the essence of the human spirit, reducing people's identities to mere faceless conformity.
In practice
In a speech against totalitarian regimes, one might quote Stevenson to highlight the dangers of such systems.
There is...a spiritual hunger in the world today and it cannot be satisfied...by better cars on longer credit terms.
What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.
Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them.
Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.
I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.
Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.
It is often said that definitions of Islamic government are imprecise. To me, however, they seemed to have a clarity that was completely familiar and also, it must be said, far from reassuring.
At the heart of that western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man...is the touchstone of value, and all society, all groups, and states, exist for that person's benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.
It's dangerous to read the Internet about yourself when you're me. Or when you're anyone in the public eye.
Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work.
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