Concession Essay Quotes

During the war, the holders of power in all countries found it necessary to bribe the populations into cooperation by unusual concessions. Wage-earners were allowed a living wage, Hindus were told they were men and brothers, women were given the vote, and young people were allowed to enjoy those innocent pleasures of which the old, in the name of morality, always wish to rob them. The war being won, the victors set to work to deprive their tools of advantages temporarily conceded.

as I begIn my journey away from the law life, you should know, or already have figured out, that I think the law looms and it consumes, fumes, presumes, entombs; it lurks in the classroom, the conference room, the boardroom, and the courtroom; sometimes it assumes; it is often the legendary professional jealous mistress, hiding within a law firm with a nom de plume that sounds austere and thoughtful and august and distinguished... and sometimes, just sometimes, despite itself, it manages to bloom. It is larger than life. It makes few concessions for dreamers, and perhaps dreamers have no right to expect concessions. It took me a very, very long time to learn this: while there may be better ways to go through life, at the same time, there are many, many worse ways to go through life.

A further reason for becoming more self-aware, is because the unconscious is not only home to elements of our character which conflict with our self-image and elicit shame, such as our character faults and weaknesses, but it also contains much of what is best about us. This is especially true in the modern day, where we tend to rely too much on our social role, or what Jung called the persona, in the building up of our character. In so doing we make “. . .a formidable concession to the external world, a genuine self-sacrifice which drives the ego straight into identification with the persona, so that people really do exist who believe they are what they pretend to be.” Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

To the optimistic view that the nation was making progress (“not enough progress, to be sure, but progress nevertheless”), Baldwin had this to say: I’m delighted to know there’ve been many fewer lynchings in the year 1963 than there were in the year 1933, but I also have to bear in mind—I have to bear it in mind because my life depends on it—that there are a great many ways to lynch a man. The impulse in American society, as far as I can tell from my experience in it, has essentially been to ignore me when it could, and then when it couldn’t, to intimidate me; and when that failed, to make concessions.