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.
Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.
It was his subconscious which told him this - that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.
To come to know that nothing is good, nothing is bad, is a turning point; it is a conversion. You start looking in; the outside reality loses meaning. The social reality is a fiction, a beautiful drama; you can participate in it, but then you donβt take it seriously. It is just a role to be played; play it as beautifully, as efficiently, as possible. But donβt take it seriously, it has nothing of the ultimate in it.
The feelings of my smallness and my nothingness always kept me good company.
Thank God I am deemed worthy to be hated by the world.
It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one's own identity.
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