It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to listen, to attempt to increase, by even a tiny amount, the quantity of kindness and humanity in the world.
Interpretation
Everyone has the power to show kindness and humanity to others, regardless of differences.
This quote emphasizes the idea that acts of kindness and empathy are within everyone's reach. It suggests that even small gestures of support and understanding can contribute significantly to increasing compassion and humanity in the world, encouraging individuals to be courageous in their interactions with others who may be different from themselves.
In practice
During a speech on community service, to inspire volunteers.
Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.
We think of speaking as something we do naturally, without any effort. But like playing music, it requires attention and knowledge and practice.
So much of what passes for conversation today is degraded. It's either about one-upmanship, or dreary trivia. Even the cut and thrust of wit and bons mots is a form of bedazzlement designed to stop conversations dead rather than broaden them.
I think one of the most important changes of our time has been our attitude to fear. Every civilisation defends itself by keeping fears out and saying 'we protect you from fear'. But it also produces new fears and throughout history people have changed the kind of fears which have worried them.
Conversation creates a new kind of network within organizations. Current networks are used for competitive advantage, but conversation is focused on encouraging people to realize their potential.
However fascinating you may think you are, there is a limit to what you can know about yourself.
The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.
One person can make a difference, even if it takes forty years.
For years now I have heard the word "wait." It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never."
I like to think of Everest as a great mountaineering challenge, and when you've got people just streaming up the mountain - well, many of them are just climbing it to get their name in the paper, really.
Sometimes it takes more courage to get up and run than to stay. You either just do it or you don't. I got so scared the first day in combat I just decided to go along with it.
Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.
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