As precious as life itself is our heritage of individual freedom, for man's free agency is a God-given gift.
David O. MckayRead
The rising sun can dispel the darkness of night, but it cannot banish the blackness of malice, hatred, bigotry, and selfishness from the hearts of humanity.
Interpretation
The power of goodness and light can't remove the negativity and malice that exists in human hearts.
This quote emphasizes that while the arrival of positivity and enlightenment, represented by the rising sun, can eliminate ignorance and despair symbolized by darkness, it cannot eradicate the deeper, more pervasive issues of malice, hatred, bigotry, and selfishness. These qualities are intrinsic to humanity and require conscious efforts to overcome, pointing to the necessity of moral and ethical responsibility for individuals and society.
In practice
In a speech about social justice, this quote can underscore the importance of addressing the root causes of prejudice.
As precious as life itself is our heritage of individual freedom, for man's free agency is a God-given gift.
Motherhood is the one thing in all the world which most truly exemplifies the God-given virtues of creating and sacrificing. Though it carries the woman close to the brink of death, motherhood also leads her into the very realm of the fountains of life and makes her co-partner with the Creator in bestowing upon eternal spirits mortal life.
It is possible to make home a bit of heaven; indeed, I picture heaven to be a continuation of the ideal home
Happiness and peace will come to earth only as the light of love and human compassion enter the souls of men.
Out of the homes of America will come the future citizens of America, and only as those homes are what they should be will this nation be what it should be.
There are seeds of happiness planted in every human soul. Our mental attitude and disposition constitute the environment in which these seeds may germinate.
Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.
We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and the contradictions within them will never be eliminated or resolved. That challenge is essential to their power and their attraction. War stories matter.
Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
Environmental history was . . . born out of a moral purpose, with strong political commitments behind it, but also became, as it matured, a scholarly enterprise that had neither any simple, nor any single, moral or political agenda to promote. Its principal goal became one of deepening our understanding of how humans have been affected by their natural environment through time and, conversely, how they have affected that environment and with what results.
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