We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it.
Freedoms, like privileges, prevail or are imperiled together You cannot harm or strive to achieve one without harming or furthering all.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the interconnectedness of freedoms and privileges, suggesting that one cannot pursue or undermine any single freedom without affecting all others.
José Martí's quote illustrates the idea that freedoms and privileges are not isolated; they exist in a delicate balance and influence one another. Thus, it stresses the importance of protecting all forms of freedom, as attempts to undermine one can lead to the detriment of others. This recognition of interdependence calls for a collective responsibility in upholding and defending civil liberties in society, as the loss of one freedom inevitably threatens the stability of all.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech advocating for civil rights, this quote can highlight the necessity of protecting all liberties.
More from Jose Marti
All quotes →Like bones to the human body, the axle to the wheel, the wing to the bird, and the air to the wing, so is liberty the essence of life. Whatever is done without it is imperfect.
Men have no special right because they belong to one race or another: the word man defines all rights.
Other famous men, those of much talk and few deeds, soon evaporate. Action is the dignity of greatness.
Man is a living duty, a depository of powers that he must not leave in a brute state. Man is a wing.
Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them.
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In our leisure we reveal what kind of people we are.
The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.
I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.
Within this arena, which grows more stable night after day, generations work and love and hope and vanish. New generations tread on the corpses of their fathers, continue the work above the abyss and struggle to tame the dread mystery. How? By cultivating a single field, by kissing a woman, by studying a stone, an animal, an idea.