A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
Interpretation
Hatred can serve as a powerful motivator to confront and eliminate harmful ideologies or practices in life.
In this quote, Rebecca West suggests that the intensity of our hatred can illuminate the darker aspects of life, allowing us to identify and eliminate the false values and beliefs that society often imposes upon us. By embracing this strong emotion, we can gain clarity and make necessary changes that help us navigate through life's complexities with a critical eye.
In practice
In a speech addressing social injustice, one might quote this to emphasize the need to challenge accepted norms.
works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.
The idea of a superior or inferior race is a myth that has been completely refuted by anthropological evidence.
What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.
I discovered when we suffer, we suffer as equals. And in their capacity to suffer, a dog is a pig, is a bear...is a boy.
What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?
You don't have to love animals to recognize that it is immoral and unjust to exploit them. But if you do love animals, but you continue to participate in their exploitation, you need to rethink your idea of what love means.
Everything that is loved, if it is not loved for His sake then this love is nothing but distress and punishment. Every action that is not performed for His sake then it is wasted and severed. Every heart that does not reach Him is wretched; veiled from achieving its success and happiness.
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