Everyone has a responsibility to not only tolerate another person's point of view, but also to accept it eagerly as a challenge to your own understanding. And express those challenges in terms of serving other people.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of embracing differing viewpoints as opportunities for personal growth and understanding.
Arlo Guthrie highlights the necessity of not merely tolerating different perspectives but actively engaging with them to enhance our own understanding. By welcoming challenges to our beliefs, we can expand our horizons and contribute to the well-being of others, indicating that open dialogue and acceptance are crucial for both personal and communal growth.
In practice
In a debate about social issues, you might use this quote to encourage open-mindedness.
He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others.
To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.
I hear the wind blowing across the desert and I see the moons of a winter night rising like great ships in the void. To them I make my vow: I will be resolute and make an art of government; I will balance my inherited past and become a perfect storehouse of my relic memories. And I will be known for kindliness more than for knowledge. My face will shine down the corridors of time for as long as humans exist.
The greatest good is what we do for others.
You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
Every society, all government, and every kind of civil compact therefore, is or ought to be, calculated for the general good and safety of the community.
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