If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the idea of protesting against perceived moral excesses, suggesting that such protests imply complicity in the existing system.
Simone De Beauvoir argues that protesting against supposed moral abuses or excesses is misguided because it distracts from the underlying systemic issues that perpetuate these problems. Instead of focusing on individual acts of excess, we should recognize and challenge the pervasive systems that allow these behaviors to occur, indicating that change requires addressing the root of the problem rather than simply reacting to its symptoms.
Themes
ProtestMoralitySystemAbuseChangeComplicityPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about social justice, one might say, 'As Simone De Beauvoir points out, protesting against moral abuses without addressing the system is futile.'
More from Simone De Beauvoir
All quotes βTwo separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248)
Simone De BeauvoirRead
To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present β¦ Eating, sleeping, cleaning β the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
Similar quotes
Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object.
Joseph AddisonRead
So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.
Philip LarkinRead
Too many sit at the banquet table of the gospel of Jesus Christ and merely nibble at the feast placed before them. They go through the motions - attending their meetings perhaps, glancing at scriptures, repeating familiar prayers - but their hearts are far away.
Joseph B. WirthlinRead
In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.
William BlakeRead
Respect for the rights of others means peace.
Benito JuarezRead
For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.
Thomas MertonRead