It all started with a quote…

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I believe that if we can’t learn from our past we’re one step closer to losing our shared humanity.

Yeah, yeah. I know. I talk a big game. But honestly, think about it. It’s our ability to think and use our intellect, to make choices based on conversations, and past events which begin to set us aside as humans.

When we side-step the importance of looking backward, analyzing, making adjustments, and doing better—our humanity is damaged.

And so, the quote. I like to look to the past and see how it can help guide us in the present. Especially in times of turbulence, or in the United States today, times of political upheaval and a looming (or already present) constitutional crisis…

When searching for quotes to share with our Elephant Journal audience about “social activism” I was struck by one that I had never read before…

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.” ~ William Faulkner

It occurred to me that this simple sentiment was exactly what we need to be bashed over the head with in 2025.

We need to gather our courage to raise our voices for truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. And we need to not be afraid of the consequences of doing so. But, easier said than done. Right?

Unsurprisingly, I fell into a rabbit hole as I investigated the source and origin (and story) of this quote. It turns out that the entire quote is even better than the excerpt, and I wish it could be shouted from the rooftops.

And so I’m shouting it from the metaphorical rooftops and sharing it with you, here. Now. Because this is advice we need to take to heart.

William Faulkner was fresh from his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech when his daughter asked him to speak at her high school commencement, and he agreed. The world was facing turbulant times in 1951, as it is now, and his advice to that room in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi rang true then, as much as it rings true today.

Watch Faulker give a portion of the short four and a half minute speech: 

The excerpt of the speech is taken from a documentary released in 1952, “William Faulkner.”

Thanks to Open Culture, we’re able to read the transcript of his speech, which he handed off to the editor of the local paper after the event.

Reading the quote I originally found inside this speech in its entirety, with the context, made me appreciate it even more: 

“Years ago, before any of you were born, a wise Frenchman said, ‘If youth knew; if age could.’ We all know what he meant: that when you are young, you have the power to do anything, but you don’t know what to do. Then, when you have got old and experience and observation have taught you answers, you are tired, frightened; you don’t care, you want to be left alone as long as you yourself are safe; you no longer have the capacity or the will to grieve over any wrongs but your own.

“So you young men and women in this room tonight, and in thousands of other rooms like this one about the earth today, have the power to change the world, rid it forever of war and injustice and suffering, provided you know how, know what to do. And so according to the old Frenchman, since you can’t know what to do because you are young, then anyone standing here with a head full white hair should be able to tell you.

“But maybe this one is not as old and wise as his white hairs pretend to claim. Because he can’t give you a glib answer or pattern either. But he can tell you this, because he believes this. What threatens us today is fear. Not the atom bomb, nor even fear of it, because if the bomb fell on Oxford tonight, all it could do would be to kill us, which is nothing, since in doing that, it will have robbed itself of its only power over us: which is fear of it, the being afraid of it. Our danger is not that. Our danger is the forces in the world today which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass by fear and bribery — giving him free food which he has not earned, easy and valueless money which he has not worked for; the economies and ideologies or political systems, communist or socialistic or democratic, whatever they wish to call themselves, the tyrants and the politicians, American or European or Asiatic, whatever they call themselves, who would reduce man to one obedient mass for their own aggrandizement and power, or because they themselves are baffled and afraid, afraid of, or incapable of, believing in man’s capacity for courage and endurance and sacrifice.

“That is what we must resist, if we are to change the world for man’s peace and security. It is not men in the mass who can and will save man. It is man himself, created in the image of God so that he shall have the power to choose right from wrong, and so be able to save himself because he is worth saving — man, the individual, men and women, who will refuse always to be tricked or frightened or bribed into surrendering, not just the right but the duty too, to choose between justice and injustice, courage and cowardice, sacrifice and greed, pity and self — who will believe always not only in the right of man to be free of injustice and rapacity and deception, but the duty and responsibility of man to see that justice and truth and pity and compassion are done.

“So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth; in one generation all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant of afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it.”

May we take these wise words from a wise man and turn to them in a new century, with new crises, but where the advice is still sound. Still needed. Still…relevant.