What is worse than having no sight is being able to see but having no vision.
Helen KellerRead
The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people.
Interpretation
A true democracy is measured by how well it looks after its citizens rather than its material achievements.
Helen Keller emphasizes that the essence of a democracy is not defined by its physical infrastructure or technological advancements, but by how genuinely it serves and prioritizes the well-being of its citizens. This quote invites reflection on the core values of a society and challenges the notion that outward growth and efficiency can substitute for the moral duty to care for all individuals, particularly the vulnerable.
In practice
This quote can be referenced in a discourse on civic responsibility during a community meeting.
What is worse than having no sight is being able to see but having no vision.
What could be worse than being born without sight? Being born with sight and no vision.
Knowledge is power." Rather, knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge - broad, deep knowledge - is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man's progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life.
Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.
Our beloved ones have not 'gone to a far country.' It is only the veil of sense that separates them from us, and even that veil grows thin when our thoughts reach out to them.
It's wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.
We have tried to define precisely what it means to be a force for good - always do the right, ethical thing. Ultimately, 'Don't be evil' seems the easiest way to summarize it.
Fruits are always of the same nature with the seeds and roots from which they come, and trees are known by the fruits they bear: as a man begets a man, and a beast a beast, that society of men which constitutes a government upon the foundation of justice, virtue, and the common good, will always have men to promote those ends; and that which intends the advancement of one man's desire and vanity, will abound in those that will foment them.
The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.
This woman is beautiful and clever: but how much cleverer she would have become if she were not beautiful!
Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.
Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.
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