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.
The past is always - one moment it's what happened three minutes ago, and one minute it's what happened 30 years ago. And they flow into each other in ways that we can't predict and that we keep discovering in dreams, which keep bringing up feelings and moments, some of which we never actually saw.
Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.
The point is not that Jesus was a good guy who accepted everybody, and thus we should do the same (though that would be good). Rather, his teachings and behaviour reflect an alternative social vision. Jesus was not talking about how to be good and how to behave within the framework of a domination system. He was a critic of the domination system itself.
To picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong.
The comfortable people in tight houses felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.
The only time laughter is wicked is when it is turned against Him Who gave it.
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