Parenting & Family Quote by Emma Goldman

Human suffering, Goldman suggests, has to be dressed up like a carnival prize before the crowd will so much as glance at it. The insult is deliberate. Calling the public “baby people” isn’t just cranky elitism; it’s a diagnosis of how mass attention gets manufactured. Sorrow, in its raw form, demands patience, moral stamina, and inconvenient choices. Turn it into a “toy with glaring colors” and it becomes consumable: a sensation, a spectacle, a story with easy villains, a hashtag before hashtags. The line “for a while at least” is the knife twist. Even outrage has a shelf life.

The subtext is about mediation and power. If suffering must be toy-ified to register, then whoever controls the toy controls the emotional weather: newspapers, politicians, reformers, even would-be revolutionaries. Goldman knew the trap of sentimental politics: pity can be mobilized, but it can also be redirected, exhausted, or sold. Her metaphor anticipates a culture in which empathy competes with novelty, where tragedy becomes “content” and the audience is trained to crave the next bright object.

Context matters because Goldman wasn’t a detached commentator; she was a radical organizer watching public opinion surge and evaporate around labor repression, anarchist scares, war fever, and the melodramas of state violence. The quote functions as both warning and tactic. If attention is infantile, the activist’s dilemma is brutal: refuse the toy and be ignored, or use the toy and risk turning real pain into a prop. Goldman’s cynicism is a demand for grown-up politics, the kind that outlasts the headline.