We were equals once when we lay new-born babes on our nurse's knees. We will be equal again when they tie up our jaws for the last sleep.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the inherent equality of humans from birth to death.
Olive Schreiner's quote emphasizes the natural equality of all human beings, suggesting that we are all born equal as infants and will ultimately meet the same fate in death. It serves as a reminder that societal differences and hierarchies are ultimately superficial, and that the essence of our humanity binds us together from the very beginning to the end of our lives.
In practice
In a discussion about social justice, one might quote this to emphasize the fundamental equality of all people.
No woman has the right to marry a man if she has to bend herself out of shape for him. She might wish to, but she could never be to him with all her passionate endeavor what the other woman could be to him without trying. Character will dominate over all and will come out at last.
Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it normally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death.
I try to believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Count them, Alice. One, there are drinks that make you shrink. Two, there are foods that make you grow. Three, animals can talk. Four, cats can disappear. Five, there is a place called Underland. Six, I can slay the Jabberwocky.
Things are not to be judged good or bad merely because the public think so.
We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.
I'm an Afro-realist. I take what comes, and I do my best to affect what is unacceptable in society.
Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state.
Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public.
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