Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Paton

Paton’s line is a moral strategy disguised as a consolation. He isn’t offering a soothing slogan about “being the change.” He’s naming the bleak arithmetic of living in a society structured to grind people down: you cannot out-argue cruelty into disappearing, and you cannot safely pretend you’re untouched by it. Endurance, for Paton, is not passive stamina. It’s a deliberate practice that keeps your inner life from being colonized by what you witness.

The subtext is almost prosecutorial. “Man’s inhumanity to man” isn’t an unfortunate glitch; it’s a pattern, an inheritance, a system. Paton wrote as a South African confronting the everyday violence and legal architecture of racial domination, later formalized and entrenched by apartheid. In that context, “only one way” reads less like idealism than triage: when the public world rewards dehumanization, the private world becomes the last defensible border.

The sentence works because of its pivot from spectacle to agency. Paton doesn’t ask you to fix “man”; he narrows the frame to “in one’s own life,” where hypocrisy is harder to hide. “Exemplify” is the key verb: not preach, not perform, not tweet. Model it. Make humanity measurable in behavior - attention, fairness, restraint, risk. He implies that the real danger of cruelty is imitation: the oppressed can be taught to despise, the comfortable can be trained to look away. His antidote is stubborn, almost defiant decency, not because it wins quickly, but because it keeps you human enough to keep fighting.