Time & Perspective Quote by Fred Korematsu

Patience is doing the heavy lifting here, but not the soft kind. Korematsu is talking about the slow violence of being correct in a country that has already decided you are inconvenient. The line reads like folksy encouragement until you remember what he was up against: the U.S. government’s mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1944 after Korematsu refused to comply. “Stick to it” isn’t motivational grit; it’s a strategy for surviving institutional denial.

The specific intent is to reframe righteousness as endurance. He’s warning that truth doesn’t arrive with a trumpet; it arrives with paperwork, appeals, decades of activists pushing evidence back into public view. Korematsu didn’t live to see the Court formally overturn his case, but he did see the conviction vacated in the 1980s when suppressed government documents surfaced. That arc is embedded in the sentence: being right is not a feeling, it’s a record you build until it becomes undeniable.

Subtextually, the quote rejects the comforting myth that justice is self-correcting. Time doesn’t “prove” anything on its own; people do, by refusing to let their story be flattened into wartime necessity or national panic. It’s also a pointed message to marginalized communities: legitimacy often arrives late, after reputations are damaged and lives are spent. The line works because it’s modest, almost plain, while carrying the moral weight of someone who learned that vindication can be real and still cost everything.