No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
Interpretation
Great movements aimed at societal change deserve respect and should not be ridiculed, as mockery undermines their efforts.
This quote emphasizes the importance of treating serious movements aimed at transforming the world with the respect they deserve. It suggests that mockery not only belittles these efforts but also weakens their foundation, preventing genuine progress and promoting a corrosive attitude that can undermine the very ideals these movements stand for.
In practice
In a speech advocating for social justice, one might cite this quote to stress the importance of respecting serious efforts for change.
Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
I grew up under the politics of my size and my skin. I grew up under the politics of the sound of my voice and a lack of agency, or a feeling of a lack of agency, and not always being able to find myself in images that were in the media.
It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear.
It is time for blacks to begin the shift from a wartime to a peacetime identity, from fighting for opportunity to the seizing of it.
After winter comes the summer. After night comes the dawn. And after every storm, there comes clear, open skies.
In this new world economy, national boundaries are increasingly becoming obsolete.
I'm not going to change the world overnight. It's one person at a time, and hopefully they're people in positions of power who can help people get in those roles and really, truly embrace colorblind casting.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.