Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Wilde suggests that America's existence was not a discovery in the traditional sense, but rather an awareness of something already present.
This quote by Oscar Wilde posits the idea that the 'discovery' of America is less about a literal finding of land and more about the recognition and understanding of it by those who encountered it. It challenges the conventional narrative of discovery, encouraging a deeper reflection on the idea of existence and the perceptions we hold of places and cultures that we may not fully understand.
Themes
AmericaDiscoveryPerceptionRecognitionExistence
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on colonialism, this quote can illustrate how historical narratives can be reconsidered.
More from Oscar Wilde
All quotes βLondon is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
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When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
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Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar WildeRead
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
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His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
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I'm appalled that the word 'feminism' has been denigrated to a place of almost ridicule and I very passionately believe the word needs to be revalued and reintroduced with power and understanding that this is a global picture. It isn't about us and them.
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To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey-and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.
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He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence.
Rainer Maria RilkeRead
The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.
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