The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.
Interpretation
Human rights discussions should focus on real issues rather than getting caught up in the details of language.
Tom Stoppard's quote highlights the importance of addressing the core issues related to human rights rather than being distracted by linguistic precision. In the face of real suffering and injustice, the urgency of human rights often requires straightforward action and advocacy, rather than getting bogged down in semantics which can detract from the urgency of the situation.
In practice
During a human rights conference, this quote can emphasize the need for action over discussion.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be who I really am. I'm going to figure out what that is.
I hold all knowledge that is concerned with things that actually exist - all that is commonly called Science - to be of very slight value compared to the knowledge which, like philosophy and mathematics, is concerned with ideal and eternal objects, and is freed from this miserable world which God has made.
In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.
I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
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