We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the importance of building deeper connections and unity among people before merely coexisting in close proximity.
Lyndon B. Johnson's quote reflects on the modern world's dynamics, suggesting that while we may live close to one another, we often fail to cultivate the bonds of brotherhood and community. It emphasizes the need for empathy, understanding, and a genuine sense of togetherness that goes beyond mere geographical proximity, urging us to focus on forming meaningful relationships and fostering a collective identity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech advocating for community engagement.
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.
We do this in order to slow down aggression. We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South Vietnam who have bravely born this brutal battle for so many years with so many casualties. And we do this to convince the leaders of North Vietnam-and all who seek to share their conquest-of a simple fact: We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.
So far are we generally from thinking what we often say of the shortness of life, that at the time when it is necessarily shortest we form projects which we delay to execute, indulge such expectations as nothing but along train of events can gratify, and suffer those passions to gain upon us which are only excusable in the prime of life.
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
If government is to serve any purpose it is to do for others what they are unable to do for themselves.
There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to 'social peace,' though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force.
It is not the germs we need worry about. It is our inner terrain.
No one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.
"I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment." That's the beginning of the transformation of consciousness.
It is only human supremacy, which is as unacceptable as racism and sexism, that makes us afraid of being more inclusive.
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
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