At Kobe, whither I fled from Hong Kong, I took a step of great importance. I cut off my cue, which had been growing all my life.
Sun Yat-SenRead
The goal of the revolution is to achieve the people's rights, but during the course of the revolution, we must stress military power - and the two are mutually contradictory.
Interpretation
Revolution aims to secure rights for the people, yet requires military strength, creating a conflict between ideals and means.
This quote by Sun Yat-Sen highlights the inherent contradiction in revolutionary movements, where the pursuit of liberating the rights of the populace often necessitates the use of military force. While the ultimate goal is the emancipation of the people, the means employed can undermine the very principles of freedom and justice that the revolution seeks to establish.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the complexities of social movements.
At Kobe, whither I fled from Hong Kong, I took a step of great importance. I cut off my cue, which had been growing all my life.
After the Manchu government had carried on wars with foreign nations and had been defeated, China was forced to sign many unequal treaties. Foreign nations are still using these treaties to bind China, and as a result, China fails at whatever she attempts.
What problem does Pan-Asianism attempt to solve? The problem is how to terminate the sufferings of the Asiatic peoples and how to resist the aggression of the powerful European countries. In a word, Pan-Asianism represents the cause of the oppressed Asiatic peoples.
How can human rights be ever developed for the majority of Chinese people? The only way is to organize. To organize workers, peasants, merchants, industrialists, and students at the grassroots level.
At thirteen, I accompanied my mother to the Hawaiian Islands. There, for the first time, I saw the wonder of a steamship and the vastness of the ocean. From that time on, I was eager to acquire the knowledge of the West and to fathom the mysteries of nature.
Because of poverty, we must adopt the capitalist means of production to develop our resources to get rich. However, if we ignore the issue of social justice at the beginning of China's industrialization, we will sow the seeds of class warfare in the future.
He [Washington] has often declared to me that he considered our new constitution as an experiment on the practicability of republican government, and with what dose of liberty man could be trusted for his own good; that he was determined the experiment should have a fair trial, and would lose the last drop of his blood in support of it. And these declarations he repeated to me the oftener and the more pointedly.
You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in.
One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.
War expands government powers. The trouble is that, when the war goes away, the government powers do not.
Democracy is an awful way to run a country, but it's the best system we have.
Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.
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