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.
Chastity, or cleanness of heart, holds a glorious and distinguished place among the virtues, because she, alone, enables man to see God; hence Truth itself said, 'Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.'
Perhaps, in retrospect, there would be little motivation even for malevolent extraterrestrials to attack the Earth; perhaps, after a preliminary survey, they might decide it is more expedient just to be patient for a little while and wait for us to self-destruct.
Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.
Germany's path to greater military assertiveness has not been linear, and it never will be. Germans do not believe that talking at roundtables solves every problem, but neither do they think that shooting does.
No evil can happen to a good man either in life or after death.
A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.
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