"To make our way, we must have firm resolve, persistence, tenacity. We must gear ourselves to work hard all the way. We can never let up"
About this Quote
A terse credo of disciplined progress, the line joins moral fibre to practical counsel. Firm resolve names the inner decision not to be turned aside; persistence and tenacity carry that decision through time, past setbacks and fatigue. The verb gear adds an industrial metaphor: to gear oneself is to set the mechanism of will and habit into alignment so the work transmits power without slipping. All the way rejects spurt-and-stall effort. Never let up is not a flourish; it is the hard edge of endurance.
Ralph Bunche knew the terrain he describes. Raised with few resources and confronting American racism, he climbed through UCLA and Harvard into a career that demanded stamina: field research on colonialism, long nights drafting reports, and, most famously, the months of fraught negotiations that produced armistice agreements in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Peace, as he told the Nobel committee, is not self-executing. It requires relentless, often unglamorous labor sustained by hope disciplined into habit. His words have the cadence of a field manual for civic life and diplomacy alike.
The repetition of We must widens the circle. This is not a cult of the exceptional individual; it is a communal ethic. Societies make their way as people adopt routines of steady work, resist cynicism, and keep pressure on institutions that otherwise drift toward inertia. In the realm of decolonization and civil rights where Bunche worked, breakthroughs rarely came from a single dramatic moment. They came from years of petitions, meetings, drafts, and compromises, each requiring the same resolve on day 500 as on day one.
There is a warning embedded here. Ease, fatigue, and premature self-congratulation are the perennial saboteurs of progress. Resolve without persistence collapses at the first headwind; persistence without tenacity dissolves under sustained resistance. Aligning all three, then committing to hard work without respite, is not romance but realism about how anything worthy is built and kept.
Ralph Bunche knew the terrain he describes. Raised with few resources and confronting American racism, he climbed through UCLA and Harvard into a career that demanded stamina: field research on colonialism, long nights drafting reports, and, most famously, the months of fraught negotiations that produced armistice agreements in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Peace, as he told the Nobel committee, is not self-executing. It requires relentless, often unglamorous labor sustained by hope disciplined into habit. His words have the cadence of a field manual for civic life and diplomacy alike.
The repetition of We must widens the circle. This is not a cult of the exceptional individual; it is a communal ethic. Societies make their way as people adopt routines of steady work, resist cynicism, and keep pressure on institutions that otherwise drift toward inertia. In the realm of decolonization and civil rights where Bunche worked, breakthroughs rarely came from a single dramatic moment. They came from years of petitions, meetings, drafts, and compromises, each requiring the same resolve on day 500 as on day one.
There is a warning embedded here. Ease, fatigue, and premature self-congratulation are the perennial saboteurs of progress. Resolve without persistence collapses at the first headwind; persistence without tenacity dissolves under sustained resistance. Aligning all three, then committing to hard work without respite, is not romance but realism about how anything worthy is built and kept.
Quote Details
| Topic | Perseverance |
|---|
More Quotes by Ralph
Add to List
