No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
Interpretation
Great movements aimed at societal change deserve respect and should not be ridiculed, as mockery undermines their efforts.
This quote emphasizes the importance of treating serious movements aimed at transforming the world with the respect they deserve. It suggests that mockery not only belittles these efforts but also weakens their foundation, preventing genuine progress and promoting a corrosive attitude that can undermine the very ideals these movements stand for.
In practice
In a speech advocating for social justice, one might cite this quote to stress the importance of respecting serious efforts for change.
Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
Illness strikes men when they are exposed to change.
The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.
I want to say that probably 24 hours after I told CBS that I was stepping down at my 65th birthday, I was already regretting it. And I regretted it every day since.
After weeks on the road, listening to a language you don’t understand, using a currency whose value you don’t comprehend, walking down streets you’ve never walked down before, you discover that your old “I,” along with everything you ever learned, is absolutely no use at all in the face of those new challenges, and you begin to realize that buried deep in your unconscious mind there is someone much more interesting and adventurous and more open to the world and to new experiences.
Nothing that is can pause or stay; / The moon will wax, the moon will wane, / The mist and cloud will turn to rain, / The rain to mist and cloud again, / Tomorrow be today.
We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.
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