You should not allow yourself the luxuries of discouragement of despair. Bounce back immediately, and welcome the adversity because it produces harder thinking and harder drive to get to the objective.
Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the hidden and often uncomfortable truths about big business in society, akin to the taboo nature of sex in Victorian England.
Ralph Nader's quote draws a parallel between the societal repression of discussing sex in Victorian England and the contemporary reluctance to openly confront the imperfections and ethical dilemmas associated with big business. It suggests that many aspects of corporate life are obscured from public view, hinting at a collective awareness of these issues but a hesitance to engage with them directly.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech on corporate ethics, you might say, 'As Ralph Nader pointed out, our understanding of big business often hides painful truths, much like the secrets of Victorian society.'
More from Ralph Nader
All quotes βI once said to my father, when I was a boy, 'Dad we need a third political party.' He said to me, 'I'll settle for a second.'
Power concedes nothing without a demand. The struggle for justice must never be adjourned. The forces of injustice do not take vacations.
The corporate lobby in Washington is basically designed to stifle all legislative activity on behalf of consumers.
We have the most prolonged adolescence in the history of mankind. There is no other society that requires so many years to pass before people are grown up ... Adolescence is nurtured and prolonged by educational processes and by industry that has found a bonanza in embracing the adolescent population and fortifying 'adolescent values.' This prolongation of adolescence robs the country of the population group having the most risk takers, and the highest ideals.
Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity.
Similar quotes
The choicest gift of God to man, the gift of reason; and having endeavoured to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it human reason; as if man could give reason to himself.
To think that the affairs of this life always remain in the same state is a vain presumption; indeed they all seem to be perpetually changing and moving in a circular course. Spring is followed by summer, summer by autumn, and autumn by winter, which is again followed by spring, and so time continues its everlasting round. But the life of man is ever racing to its end, swifter than time itself, without hope of renewal, unless in the next that is limitless and infinite.
In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City")
The only humility that is really ours is not that which we try to show before God in prayer, but that which we carry with us, and carry out, in our ordinary conduct; the insignficances of daily life are the importances and the tests of eternity, because they prove what really is the spirit that possesses us.
The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.
You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary