Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the short-sightedness of American enterprise and its disregard for historical context.
In this quote, Barbara Kingsolver reflects on the arrogance and ignorance perceived in American enterprise, suggesting that a lack of awareness regarding the past leads to a failure to appreciate the significance of the present. By describing the nation as 'amnesiac,' she highlights the tendency to focus solely on immediate benefits while neglecting the historical consequences of actions taken against the land and its resources.
Themes
ArroganceIgnoranceHistoryEnterpriseAwareness
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about corporate responsibility, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of historical awareness in decision-making.
More from Barbara Kingsolver
All quotes →Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
Barbara KingsolverRead
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
Barbara KingsolverRead
I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Similar quotes
You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.
Nhat HanhRead
God never breaks His promises.
Francis ChanRead
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
Robert M. PirsigRead
Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.
Simone WeilRead
War is America's central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.
Stanley HauerwasRead
Can man, the finite and sinful one, cooperate with God, the Infinite and Holy One? Yes, he can, precisely because God Himself has become man, become body, and here (in the liturgy), again and again, he comes through his body to us who live in the body.
Pope Benedict XviRead