'He [the truly ethical man] breaks no leaf from the tree, plucks no flower, is careful to crush no insect with his feet. When he works by his lamp in the summer evening, he prefers to keep his window shut and to breathe the stifling air rather than to see insect after insect falling on his table with singed wings. If after a rain he is walking on the road and sees an earthworm gone astray, he remembers it will dry up in the sun if it does not get back in time to the earth into which it can burrow, and helps it from the fatal stones into the grass. If he comes upon an insect fallen into a puddle, he takes time to save it by extending a leaf or a stalk to it. He is not afraid of being laughed at as sentimental. It is the fate of every truth to be ridiculed before it is recognized. It was once considered stupid to think colored men were really human and must be treated humanely. The time is coming when people will be amazed that it took so long for mankind to recognize that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with ethics.'
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The effort to remold, in one's own life, the culture one has grown into is heavy with danger. The searcher is likely to be treated as a criminal or a madman, condemned and criticized by his own society, ridiculed, even persecuted. Even if he is more fortunate--even if he is simply ignored by others--he must begin his struggle as a cripple. For to consciously reject the generalized attitudes' of the parent society is to reject positive reference points that have helped him evaluate his actions and accomplishments.This is the price of freedom on the peripheries. We are able to free ourselves from our parent culture only by destroying parts of ourselves, much as an animal might escape the hunter's trap by gnawing off its own leg. But unlike the wounded animal, the detached person is doubly crippled; however he mutilates himself, he will never quite be free of the trap but will carry it with him in his new freedom.
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When you make a mistake or get ridiculed or rejected, look at mistakes as learning experiences, and ridicule as ignorance. . . . Look at rejection as part of one performance, not as a turn down of the performer.
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Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as 'sentimental', 'impractical', or 'womanish', etc., by those whose fun, profit or convenience was at stake.
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Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.
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Honest error is to be pitied, not ridiculed.
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All truth passes through 3 stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
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'All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.'
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At the beginning of a great national change, the patriot is a scarce man: scorned, ridiculed and forgotten. When his cause succeeds, however, all men will join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.
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All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
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