So, if you don’t fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed - it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.
Interpretation
Being different can be a sign of holding onto important human values.
This quote speaks to the idea that feeling out of place or troubled in a conformist society may indicate a deeper connection to fundamental human values that others have abandoned. It encourages individuals to embrace their uniqueness and be proud of their deviancy as a testament to their integrity and authenticity.
In practice
A motivational speaker could use this quote to encourage youth to embrace their uniqueness.
The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can't be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth.
I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn't change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.
I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.
Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.
Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.
In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.
Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.
In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
A straight oar looks bent in the water. It matters not merely that we see a thing, but how we see it.
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