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Quote of the Day: Courage
“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” – Winston Churchill
Churchill is right on both counts. It takes courage to stand up and speak, especially when your words go counter to today’s conventional and delivered wisdom. That goes double, or maybe triple in today’s cancel culture, when speaking the truth could cost you your job and your fortune, and turn you into an outcast. There is too little of that going on today, although there is beginning to be more of it.
But it also takes courage to sit down and listen to contrary opinion – and even more courage to accept what you believed was wrong and the contrary opinion is correct. Indeed, in his brilliant book The People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck convincingly argues that evil emerges when people lack the courage to abandon false beliefs and instead fight to hang on to them. This dynamic can be seen in today’s Woke culture, but it has been present many times before, most notably in Mao Cultural Revolution and in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union.
It takes a brave individual to stand up and speak when they know they will be shouted down. It takes an equally brave one to listen and decide from the basis of that listening, to change their mind.
Published in General
Excellent, wise, and timely advice from one of the 20th century’s most quotable men.
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FTFY
We are not quite there. Yet.
We are so wedded to our ideas that we are unable to distance ourselves from them to reflect on them. We believe we will be lost without them; by clinging to them, we are already lost.
Like Dan Rather?
That is an apt example. I am also thinking Bernie Sanders who has never abandoned Communism.