One person can make a difference, even if it takes forty years.
Fred KorematsuRead
My folks were so worried about what they were going to do. All they can take was what they could carry with their hands. What they had for twenty-five years of building their business was going to go out the door, or they're going to lose it.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the struggle of loss and the emotional turmoil of having to abandon a lifetime of work and business.
This quote by Fred Korematsu speaks to the profound sense of vulnerability and fear faced by individuals who are forced to leave behind the fruits of their labor due to circumstances beyond their control. It highlights the emotional weight of losing one's livelihood and the uncertainty that comes with such a transition, emphasizing the sheer determination and resilience required to cope with such challenges.
In practice
During a motivational speech on overcoming adversity.
One person can make a difference, even if it takes forty years.
As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing.
I lost everything when they put us in prison. I was an enemy alien, a man without a country.
All of them turned their backs on me at that time because they thought I was a troublemaker.
Every day in school, we said the pledge to the flag, 'with liberty and justice for all,' and I believed all that.
I'm Asian, so they assumed I'm not an American and that I come from Japan. Restaurants would refuse to serve me, and places would refuse to give you a haircut.
By their victory, the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions and other units of the Fifth Amphibious Corps have made an accounting to their country which only history will be able to value fully. Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue.
The most dangerous kind of person... is one who is afraid of his own shadow.
When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.
The willow which bends to the tempest often escapes better than the oak which resists it.
'They have nothing in their entire arsenal to break the spirit of one single Republican prisoner-of-war who refuses to be broken,' I thought, and that was very true. They cannot or never will break our spirit.
Parliaments have stopped laughing at woman suffrage, and politicians have begun to dodge! It is the inevitable premonition of coming victory.
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