Why not, when it can be done without exposure or expense, let me rescue some of America's miserable children from vice and guilt?
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of helping those in need without incurring personal costs.
Dorothea Dix's quote reflects her compassionate call to action for the betterment of society, specifically in rescuing vulnerable children from the grips of vice and guilt. It advocates for altruism and social responsibility, suggesting that there are ways to enact positive change without significant personal risk or financial expense, encouraging others to join in the effort to uplift the marginalized.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech to advocate for children's rights and welfare.
Steady, firm, and kind government of prisoners is the truest humanity and the best exercise of duty. It is with convicts as with children: unseasonable indulgence, indiscreetly granted, leads to mischiefs which we may deplore but cannot repair.
I was early taught by sorrow to shed tears, and now when sudden joy lights up, or any unexpected sorrow strikes my heart, I find it difficult to repress the full and swelling tide of feeling.
I shall be well enough when I get to Kentucky or Alabama. The tonic I need is the tonic of opposition. That always sets me on my feet.
Time passed solely in the pursuit of pleasure leaves no solid enjoyment for the future; but from the hours you spend in reading and studying useful books, you will gather a golden harvest in future years.
With care and patience, people may accomplish things which, to an indolent person, would appear impossible.
My wish is to be known only thru my work.
God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself.
Knot the tie and go to work, unknot the tie and go to sleep. I sleep. I dream. I wake. I sing. I get out the hammer and start knocking in the wooden pegs that affix the meaning to the landscape, the inner life to the body, the names to the things. I float too much to wander, like you, in the real world. I envy it but that’s the dealio—you’re a train and I’m a trainstation and when I try to guess your trajectory I end up telling my own story.
Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work.
What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?
You all know," said the Guide, "that security is mortals' greatest enemy.
I am a socialist; of course I am a socialist. To hold a vision that society can be fundamentally different, to believe that all people can be equal - that is not a new idea.
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