The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
Barbara W. TuchmanRead
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
Interpretation
Revolutions can lead to new forms of tyranny, replicating the oppression they aimed to overthrow.
This quote by Barbara W. Tuchman reflects on the cyclical nature of power, suggesting that revolutions, while intended to liberate, can ultimately result in the emergence of new tyrants who replicate the same oppressive behaviors as those they replaced. It serves as a cautionary reminder that achieving freedom requires vigilance to prevent the rise of new forms of despotism.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the outcomes of political movements during a lecture on history.
The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it's not professional.'
They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species - we, in short - had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.
Every phenomenon of nature was a word, - the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.
Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
Religious leaders will always avail themselves of public ignorance for their own purpose.
Democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves they will seek it, cherish it, and view any deprivation of it with regret. But for equality their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.
The recovery of spiritual sight and the healing of physical blindness have much in common. Some of those whose bodily eyes were blind received their sight at once, like the man who heard and immediately saw and was healed. Others recovered their sight gradually as in the case of the man, who, before he was completely cured, said, “I see men as trees, walking”. It is the same with those whose spiritual eyes were healed.
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