Daily Inspiration Quote by Pearl S. Buck

Buck knows exactly where to press: on the complacency of the comfortable. The line turns on a quiet accusation - not of cruelty, but of imaginative failure. People who have “always been free” don’t lack empathy; they lack the bodily memory that makes freedom feel like oxygen instead of a political ideal. By framing this gap as impossibility (“None… can understand”), she shuts down the easy liberal reflex to translate oppression into abstractions. Freedom, in her sentence, isn’t a principle you endorse; it’s a craving that reorganizes the mind.

The phrase “terrible fascinating power” is the key. “Fascinating” admits seduction: hope can become its own drug, a force that keeps people alive, sharp, stubborn. “Terrible” complicates the usual uplift. Hope isn’t clean. It can make people risk everything, tolerate suffering longer than they should, or accept dangerous myths because the alternative is psychic suffocation. Buck is describing hope as both salvation and destabilizer - a magnet strong enough to pull someone toward revolt, exile, or endurance.

Context matters: Buck spent decades between America and China and built her career translating lives across asymmetries of power - imperial, racial, economic, patriarchal. The intent here is literary and moral: she’s warning privileged readers that their calm opinions about liberty will always understate what’s at stake. The subtext is sharp: if you think freedom is merely “nice,” you’ve probably never been denied it.