We owe our children – the most vulnerable citizens in any society – a life free from violence and fear.
Nelson MandelaRead
Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the disparity caused by globalization and urges the need for active opposition to inequality for the sake of universal freedom.
Nelson Mandela's quote speaks to the consequences of globalization, which often benefits the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the less fortunate. He emphasizes the moral obligation to stand against such injustices and advocate for universal freedom, suggesting that true progress cannot be achieved while inequality persists.
In practice
In a speech advocating for social justice, one might use Mandela's quote to emphasize the need for collective action against inequality.
We owe our children – the most vulnerable citizens in any society – a life free from violence and fear.
What freedom am I being offered while the organization of the people remains banned? Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts.
The past is a rich resource on which we can draw in order to make decisions for the future, but it does not dictate our choices. We should look back at the past and select what is good, and leave behind what is bad.
We signal that good can be achieved amongst human beings who are prepared to trust, prepared to believe in the goodness of people.
After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one's person.
I dream of the realization of the unity of Africa, whereby its leaders combine in their efforts to solve the problems of this continent. I dream of our vast deserts, of our forests, of all our great wildernesses.
We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.
Principles are the simplicity on the far side of complexity.
I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become: me.
Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.
Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence - by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present - but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word 'quarters' the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.
Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.
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