Life & Wisdom Quote by Sherwood Anderson

A provocation disguised as a lament, Anderson's line yanks the sacred off the altar and drops it into the street. "Everyone in the world is Christ" isn't theology; it's a demolition of the comforting idea that suffering is rare, redemptive, or reserved for saints. He universalizes the symbol until it stops being a badge of holiness and becomes a diagnosis: to be human is to be burdened, misunderstood, punished for wanting too much, or for wanting the wrong thing.

The second clause sharpens the knife. "They are all crucified" turns crucifixion from an event into a condition. Anderson isn't talking about spectacular martyrdom; he's pointing at the quiet executions carried out by social conformity, sexual repression, economic pressure, small-town surveillance, and the daily humiliations that grind people down. The genius is how quickly the sentence collapses the distance between myth and ordinary life. It dares you to see your neighbor's defeat not as personal failure but as a public ritual that everyone participates in, willingly or not.

In Anderson's early-20th-century American context, this lands as both sympathy and indictment. He's writing in the wake of industrial modernity and amid suffocating moral codes, when "character" is enforced like law. By borrowing Christianity's most charged image, he exposes how casually societies manufacture scapegoats - and how eager we are to call it virtue when it's really cruelty.