We may not live in the past, but the past lives in us.
Samuel PisarRead
The Holocaust teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man when he loses his moral compass and his reason.
Interpretation
The Holocaust illustrates how human cruelty can surpass even the harshness of nature when morality is abandoned.
Samuel Pisar's quote reflects on the profound lessons learned from the Holocaust, emphasizing that while nature can be harsh and cruel, it is fundamentally benign compared to the capacity for human cruelty when individuals lose their moral compass and reason. This stark contrast serves as a warning about the dangers of moral disconnection and the potential for humanity to inflict unimaginable suffering upon one another.
In practice
During a discussion on human rights violations, this quote can be cited to emphasize the importance of moral accountability.
We may not live in the past, but the past lives in us.
In a sense, mass incarceration has emerged as a far more extreme form of physical and residential segregation than Jim Crow segregation. Rather than merely shunting people of color to the other side of town, people are locked in literal cages - en masse.
The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.
Perjury is the basest and meanest and most cowardly of crimes. What can it do? Perjury can change the common air that we breathe into the axe of an executioner.
Every life has dark tracts and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas.
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole
It is a terrible thing to be happy! How pleased we are with it! How all-sufficient we think it! How, being in possession of the false aim of life, happiness, we forget the true aim, duty!
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.