The trouble with righting some wrongs is that it makes the remaining ones seem even more unbearable.
Interpretation
Addressing certain injustices can highlight the existence of others, making them feel more oppressive.
A. A. Gill's quote speaks to the complexity of social justice and the difficulties involved when attempting to rectify specific wrongs. When certain injustices are acknowledged and addressed, it can amplify awareness of other injustices that continue to persist, creating a sense of frustration and despair over the ones that remain unaddressed.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion on social justice movements to emphasize the challenges activists face.
If the world were to end tomorrow and we could choose to save only one thing as the explanation and memorial to who we were, then we couldn't do better than the Natural History Museum, although it wouldn't contain a single human. The systematic Linnean order, the vast inquisitiveness and range of collated knowledge and beauty would tell all that is the best of us.
Sport is how poor kids from poor countries pass through the eye of the needle to riches and recognition.
Being able to afford everything you desire is not, by any means, the worst thing that can happen to you. But, depressingly, and more profoundly, neither is it the best.
America didnβt bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.
Celebrity is a national drama whose characters' parts and plots are written by the tabloids, gossip columnists, websites and interactive buttons. The famous don't actually have to turn up to their own lives at all.
Trying to learn to be a good man is like learning to play tennis against a wall. You are only a good man - a competent, capable, interesting and lovable man - when you're doing it for, or with, other people.
If the weather is too cold or rainy, I take shelter in the Regence Cafe, where I entertain myself by watching chess being played. Paris is the world center, and this cafe is the Paris centre for the finest skill at this game.
Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.
Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on.
All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.
...mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics. Every other science, even logic, especially in its early stages, is in danger of evaporating into airy nothingness, degenerating, as the Germans say, into an arachnoid film, spun from the stuff that dreams are made of. There is no such danger for pure mathematics; for that is precisely what mathematics ought to be.
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.
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