The public think the politicians don't know or care about their lives; and the politicians feel misunderstood.
Tony BlairRead
However much I dislike the idea of abortion, you should not criminalize a woman who, in very difficult circumstances, makes that choice.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes understanding and compassion towards women facing difficult decisions regarding abortion.
Tony Blair's quote reflects the complexity of moral choices surrounding abortion, advocating for a compassionate perspective that acknowledges the difficult circumstances women may encounter. He argues that while one may personally oppose abortion, it is crucial not to punish or criminalize those who make this choice under challenging conditions, highlighting a call for empathy in moral debates.
In practice
In a debate on reproductive rights, this quote can be used to argue against criminalizing women's choices.
The public think the politicians don't know or care about their lives; and the politicians feel misunderstood.
There is no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: Defeat it or be defeated by it. And defeat it we must.
Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education and education.
I want my son to grow up in a place where the people are more powerful than the government and not the other way around.
The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge.
A challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence... There is no doubt that the time to act is now.
Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever.
The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
What profit is there in agreeing that universal friendship is good, and talking of the solidarity of the human race as a grand ideal? Unless these thoughts are translated into the world of action, they are useless. The wrong in the world continues to exist just because people only talk of their ideals, and do not strive to put them into practice. If actions took the place of words, the world's misery would very soon be changed into comfort.
There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean - hell, I know that.
The trickiest thing about the double bind is that it operates imperceptibly, like shots from a gun with a silencer.
whose steps were a restless substitute for flight.
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