"Through literacy you can begin to see the universe. Through music you can reach anybody. Between the two there is you, unstoppable"
About this Quote
Grace Slick frames selfhood as a feedback loop between two kinds of power: the private power to understand and the public power to move people. “Through literacy you can begin to see the universe” is a sly escalation. Literacy isn’t just reading; it’s pattern-recognition, skepticism, the ability to decode systems that would rather stay opaque. “Begin” matters too: it promises expansion without pretending knowledge is instant enlightenment. You don’t get handed the universe; you earn a wider field of vision.
Then she pivots to music, and the sentence structure tightens into something almost blunt: “you can reach anybody.” No caveats about language barriers, politics, class. Coming from a singer who helped soundtrack the late-’60s counterculture, it reads like a veteran’s takeaway from mass feeling: a chorus can smuggle empathy, anger, or liberation past the brain’s gatekeepers. Music doesn’t argue; it recruits.
The real move is the hinge: “Between the two there is you.” She’s rejecting the idea that knowledge alone makes you effective, or that charisma alone makes you wise. The subtext is agency: you are the conduit where insight becomes communication, where understanding becomes influence. “Unstoppable” isn’t motivational-poster optimism so much as a diagnosis of what happens when you can both interpret the world and transmit feeling into it. In a culture that still splits “the arts” from “the educated,” Slick stitches them together and dares you to notice the result: a person who can see, and then make others see.
Then she pivots to music, and the sentence structure tightens into something almost blunt: “you can reach anybody.” No caveats about language barriers, politics, class. Coming from a singer who helped soundtrack the late-’60s counterculture, it reads like a veteran’s takeaway from mass feeling: a chorus can smuggle empathy, anger, or liberation past the brain’s gatekeepers. Music doesn’t argue; it recruits.
The real move is the hinge: “Between the two there is you.” She’s rejecting the idea that knowledge alone makes you effective, or that charisma alone makes you wise. The subtext is agency: you are the conduit where insight becomes communication, where understanding becomes influence. “Unstoppable” isn’t motivational-poster optimism so much as a diagnosis of what happens when you can both interpret the world and transmit feeling into it. In a culture that still splits “the arts” from “the educated,” Slick stitches them together and dares you to notice the result: a person who can see, and then make others see.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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