We didn't have music videos. You weren't an overnight sensation. You had to work at it and learn your craft: how to take care of your voice, how to pace your concerts, all that trial and error.
Aretha FranklinRead
I think women and children and older people are the three least-respected groups in our society.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the lack of respect afforded to women, children, and the elderly in society.
Aretha Franklin's quote emphasizes the societal issues surrounding respect and acknowledgment for women, children, and older individuals. These groups often face discrimination and marginalization, and Franklin's statement invites reflection on the value assigned to them in our culture, urging a recognition of their contributions and dignity.
In practice
In a speech advocating for social justice, this quote could be used to highlight the need for equality.
We didn't have music videos. You weren't an overnight sensation. You had to work at it and learn your craft: how to take care of your voice, how to pace your concerts, all that trial and error.
Trying to grow up is hurting. You make mistakes. You try to learn from them, and when you don't, it hurts even more.
My mentor was Clara Ward of the famous Ward gospel singers of Philadelphia. And my dad was my coach. He coached me. And just my natural love for music is what drove me.
It really is an honor if I can be inspirational to a younger singer or person. It means I've done my job.
In terms of helping people understand and know each other a little better, music is universal - universal and transporting.
Everybody wants respect. In their own way, three-year-olds would like respect, and acknowledgment, in their terms.
Our lives are stories, and the stories we have to give to each other are the most important. No one has a story too small and all are of equal stature. We each tell them in different ways, through different mediums—and if we care about each other, we'll take the time to listen.
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
Being a person, I had come to realize, is a communal activity. Dogs know how to be dogs. But people do not know how to be people unless and until they learn from other people.
Suicide is unspeakable, and to speak it is somehow to bring it into a human, imaginable sphere, even if only in the moment of speaking. The need to tell is both a need to tell oneself and a need to be heard.... Telling and being heard are the first steps toward reconnection.
Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.
The language of violence that many whites use to describe anti-racist endeavors is not without significance, as it is another example of how white fragility distorts reality.
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