Source identified
“But improvement is naturally slow.”
The sentence cautions against expecting useful reform to produce immediate visible results, especially when ambitious projects confront ordinary constraints.
Source note: The Idler, No. 88; Johnson is discussing a fictional philosophical society whose grand plans meet the slow pace of practical improvement.
Source identified
“Receive an injury rather than do one.”
Personal suffering is treated as morally preferable to becoming the person who deliberately inflicts unjust harm on another.
Source note: The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, maxim 5, in Darius Lyman’s 1856 English rendering; maxim order can vary across editions.
Source identified
“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”
Douglass exposes the exclusion within a national celebration of liberty when enslaved people are denied the freedom and rights being publicly commemorated.
Source note: Speech delivered at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852. Douglass contrasts the audience’s national independence with the condition of enslaved Black Americans; the line is part of an abolitionist indictment, not generic commentary on patriotism.
Source identified
“As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.”
Death strips away rank and status, emphasizing a condition shared by every person regardless of position or wealth.
Source note: The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, maxim 1, in Darius Lyman’s 1856 English rendering; maxim order can vary across editions.
Source identified
“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”
Du Bois identifies racial division and unequal relations between darker and lighter peoples as a defining political and social problem of his century.
Source note: The Souls of Black Folk, Forethought and repeated later in the book. The phrase is a historical diagnosis of racism, segregation and the aftermath of slavery, not a generic statement about interpersonal difference.
Source identified
“Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.”
Celebrated independence can sharpen awareness of exclusion when rights proclaimed as national or universal are not shared by the people whose unfreedom makes the contrast visible.
Source note: What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, July 5, 1852. The sentence precedes Douglass’s statement that the blessings of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence are not enjoyed in common under slavery.