For me Christ was not to be bought for thirty pieces of silver but with my heart's blood. We buy not cheap in this market.
Dorothy DayRead
Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the modern detachment from tradition and heritage.
Dorothy Day's quote expresses a concern about contemporary society's disconnection from its traditions and ancestors. She highlights a fear of embracing one's heritage, suggesting that this avoidance leads to a homogenization of culture, where individuals limit themselves to an average existence rather than honoring or learning from the legacies of those who came before them.
Themes
TraditionHeritageCultureIdentityNobility
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a speech about the importance of cultural heritage.
More from Dorothy Day
All quotes →The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love.
Dorothy DayRead
As we come to know the seriousness of the situation, the war, the racism, the poverty in our world, we come to realize that things will not be changed simply by words or demonstrations. Rather, it's a question of living one's life in a drastically different way.
Dorothy DayRead
I do not know how to love God except by loving the poor. I do not know how to serve God except by serving the poor.... Here, within this great city of nine million people, we must, in this neighborhood, on this street, in this parish, regain a sense of community which is the basis for peace in the world.
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The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures.
Dorothy DayRead
We're living in an age of genocide. ...And we do believe that there is not only the genocide of war, and the genocide that took place with the extermination of the Jews, but the whole program....of birth control and abortion is another form of genocide.... [T]hey claim the poor are bringing forth tremendous numbers of children and so the solution is to kill them off.
Dorothy DayRead
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