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“Let Freedom Ring Wherever the People’s Rights Are Trampled Upon”: What We Can Learn from Nelson Mandela Today

By Richard Stengel — 2020

Nelson Mandela was by nature an optimist, but he was as hard-headed as they come. He did not embrace the consoling view of history that, as Martin Luther King said (in a line often quoted by Barack Obama), “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” For him, justice was never inevitable. If the world was going to bend toward justice, he would have to do the bending himself.

Read on time.com

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Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it . . . the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way. . . .

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George Leonard
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Ultimately, nothing in this life is ‘commonplace,’ nothing is ‘in between.’ The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge. [Each person has a] vantage point that offers a truth of its own.

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George Leonard
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This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase.

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Steven Johnson
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