Helen Keller
Helen Keller
Helen Adams Kellerwas an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. The story of how Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker. Her birthplace in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, is now a museum and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth27 June 1880
CityTuscumbia, AL
CountryUnited States of America
Ignorance, poverty, and greed must disappear so that light can prevail in all places.
There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference.
It is a mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil, because by making people neglectful it lets in disaster. There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference.
We need limitations and temptations to open our inner selves, dispel our ignorance, tear off disguises, throw down old idols, and destroy false standards. Only by such rude awakenings can we be led to dwell in a place where we are less cramped, less hindered by the ever-insistent External. Only then do we discover a new capacity and appreciation of goodness and beauty and truth.
I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light but who see nothing in sea or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books. It were far better to sail forever in the night of blindness with sense, and feeling, and mind, than to be content with the mere act of seeing. The only lightless dark is the night of darkness in ignorance and insensibility.
History is a record of the incessant struggle of humanity against ignorance and oppression.
It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.
True happiness...is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
I don't want peace that passeth understanding, I want understanding which bringeth peace.
I can feel the twinkle of his eye in his handshake.
Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
So long as I confine my activities to social services and the blind, the newspapers compliment me extravagantly, calling me an 'arch-priest of the sightless' and 'wonder woman'. But when I discuss poverty and the industrial system under which we live that is a different matter.
One can never consent to creep when one feels the compulsion to soar.