Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.
Interpretation
Privilege can dull our ability to empathize and imagine the experiences of others.
Chinua Achebe's quote reflects on how privilege can act as a barrier to our imagination and sensitivity towards others. It suggests that when individuals are shielded by their own advantages and comforts, they may struggle to truly understand and empathize with the suffering or experiences of those who lack such privileges, thereby limiting their imaginative capabilities and emotional perceptions.
In practice
During a lecture on social justice, this quote can illustrate the impact of privilege on empathy.
In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!
Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To fill the Lord's holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamoring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life - to drive the crowd away from His church.
It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.
Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.
An angry man is always a stupid man.
Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers_x000D_ and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt_x000D_ of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of_x000D_ sheep against the practice of eating mutton.
Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.
A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.
Even as one and the same person is called by different names according to the different functions he performs, so also one and the same mind is called by the different names: mind, intellect, memory, and egoity, on account of the difference in the modes - and not because of any real difference.
You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
If we all think only of our own interests, we are headed for collective disaster - just look at what we are doing to our planet's climate.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.