There is...a spiritual hunger in the world today and it cannot be satisfied...by better cars on longer credit terms.
Adlai E. StevensonRead
The human race has improved everything, but the human race.
Interpretation
While humanity has made advancements in various fields, it remains flawed and unchanged in its core nature.
Adlai E. Stevenson highlights a paradox of human development in this quote. Despite our significant progress in technology, science, and other areas, the fundamental aspects of human nature, such as our capacity for conflict, greed, and cruelty, have not improved. This suggests that advancements in external measures do not necessarily translate to moral or ethical growth within humanity itself.
In practice
During a speech on social issues, one might use this quote to provoke thought on humanity's continuous shortcomings despite technological advances.
There is...a spiritual hunger in the world today and it cannot be satisfied...by better cars on longer credit terms.
What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.
Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them.
Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.
I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.
A person of good intelligence and of sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality - and it's not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing - it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street.
We ourselves cannot put any magic spells on this world. The world is its own magic.
I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
Racism is a belief system. It was assembled over centuries from many component parts - bits of biblical scripture, the propaganda of the slave-owning lobby and the pseudo-science of academics working in universities in Europe and America.
When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.
They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurerance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was so egotist...he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the beautiful comrade, the only inseparatable love...poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.
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