You been hearing about how bad I am since you were a little kid with mess in your pants! Tonight, I'm gonna whip you till you cry like a baby.
Muhammad AliRead
Tolerance and understanding won't 'trickle down' in our society any more than wealth does.
Interpretation
True progress in society requires active efforts in fostering tolerance and understanding, not just passive expectations.
Muhammad Ali's quote emphasizes that, similar to wealth, tolerance and understanding do not automatically diffuse through society without intentional action. It highlights the need for active engagement and purposeful efforts to cultivate these values rather than assuming they will emerge naturally over time.
In practice
During a lecture on social justice, I quoted Ali to emphasize the importance of active participation in promoting tolerance.
You been hearing about how bad I am since you were a little kid with mess in your pants! Tonight, I'm gonna whip you till you cry like a baby.
I've got it! I've got it! It'll make front-page headlines around the world. You can have me kidnapped, and then a couple of days before the fight I'll show up again
A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
We all have the same God, we just serve him differently. Rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, oceans all have different names, but they all contain water. So do religions have different names, and they all contain truth, expressed in different ways forms and times. It doesn't matter whether you're a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jew. When you believe in God, you should believe that all people are part of one family. If you love God, you can't love only some of his children.
It's lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believed in myself.
Put yourself out on a limb, sucka, like me! - young Cassius Clay to heavily favored thug Sonny Liston during the weigh in before Cassius wins his first title and changes his name to Muhammad Ali.
A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
The beautiful came to this city [Hollywood] in huge pathetic herds, to suffer, to be humiliated, to see the powerful currency of their beauty devalued like the Russian ruble or Argentine peso;to work as bellhops, as bar hostesses, as garbage collectors, as maids. The city was a cliff and they were its stampeding lemmings. At the foot of the cliff was the valley of the broken dolls.
Your state is not at all to be measured by the opposition that sin makes to you, but by the opposition you make to it.
I think it is obscene that we should believe that we are entitled to end somebody's life, no matter what that person has supposedly done or not done.
There is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness.
Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.
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