The Never-Ending Wrong (1977)
Context: Far away and long ago, I read Emma Goldman's story of her life, her first book in which she told the grim, deeply touching narrative of her young life during which she worked in a scrubby sweatshop making corsets by the bundle. At the same time, I was reading Prince Kropotkin's memoirs, his account of the long step he took from his early princely living to his membership in the union of the outcast, the poor, the depressed, and it was a most marvelous thing to have two splendid, courageous, really noble human beings speaking together, telling the same tale. It was like a duet of two great voices telling a tragic story. I believed in both of them at once. The two of them joined together left me no answerable argument; their dream was a grand one but it was exactly that — a dream. They both lived to know this and I learned it from them, but it has not changed my love for them or my lifelong sympathy for the cause to which they devoted their lives — to ameliorate the anguish that human beings inflict on each other — the never-ending wrong, forever incurable.
“We've devoted our lives to learning about them!" Miro said.
Ender stopped. "Not from them.”
Source: Speaker for the Dead
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Orson Scott Card 586
American science fiction novelist 1951Related quotes
Source: Think Big (1996), p. 175
About democracy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dV7N-QGV_w (Retrieved on July 20, 2010.)
Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)
Variant: ... tell them that we have some good in us, too. And the only thing worth living for is the good. That’s why we’ve got to make sure we pass it on.
Source: Where the Heart Is
Life and Destiny (1913)
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself”
Cited as a piece of anonymous folk-wisdom from the 1940s onwards https://books.google.com/books?id=iNkWAQAAMAAJ&dq=%22Learn+from+the+mistakes+of+others.+You+can%27t+live+long+enough+to+make+them+all+yourself%22&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22make+them+all+yourself%22. Not attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt until 2001 https://books.google.com/books?id=ctxi36FCi18C&pg=PA151&dq=%22Learn+from+the+mistakes+of+others%22+%22live+long%22+roosevelt&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiI_sD5mqDLAhWIKGMKHb8HAZ0Q6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=%22Learn%20from%20the%20mistakes%20of%20others%22%20%22live%20long%22%20roosevelt&f=false.
Disputed