Famous quotes containing the word understand:
“... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal, that we can understand our past through a male lens—if we are unaware that women even have a history—we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man
that looks in my face?
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?
We understand men do we not?
What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach—what the preaching could
not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Since civilizing children takes the better part of two decades—some twenty years of nonstop thinking, nurturing, teaching, coaxing, rewarding, forgiving, warning, punishing, sympathizing, apologizing, reminding, and repeating, not to mention deciding what to do when—I now understand that one wrong move is invariably followed by hundreds of opportunities to be wrong again.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)