We have to improve life, not just for those who have the most skills and those who know how to manipulate the system. But also for and with those who often have so much to give but never get the opportunity.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need for equity in improving life, ensuring opportunities are extended to everyone, especially those without access.
Dorothy Height's quote highlights the importance of creating a more equitable society where improvement in life is not reserved solely for the skilled or those who manipulate systems. It calls for including and uplifting those who possess great potential but lack the opportunities to showcase it, reinforcing the idea that true progress involves all members of society.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a speech advocating for social reform to highlight the importance of inclusivity.
I think of my life as a unity of circles. Some are concentric, others overlap, but they all connect in some way. Sometimes the connections don't happen for years. But when they do, I marvel. As in a shimmering kaleidoscope, familiar patterns keep unfolding
Progress comes from caring more about what needs to be done than about who gets the credit
We had people of all backgrounds coming together - all races, all creeds, all colors, all status in life. And coming together there was a kind of quiet dignity and a kind of sense of caring and a feeling of joint responsibility.
There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights.
The Black family of the future will foster our liberation, enhance our self-esteem, and shape our ideas and goals.
My mother helped me understand how not to show off what I knew, but how to use it so that others might benefit.
I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.
I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.
When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem.
The people who serve your fast food lunch or your after-work drinks deserve dignity - and if big companies don't start paying them enough for a decent standard of living, they have the power to close these businesses. But no one goes on strike lightly.
We have a deeply rooted misconception in our country that unhoused people have done something to deserve their conditions - when the reality is that unhoused people are living the consequences of our government's failure to secure the basic necessities people need to survive.
That's true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated.
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