Put (someone) up on a pedestal

A statue of an old white guy on a pedestal.
There is always a danger in putting someone up on a pedestal.
(Photo: Mat Reding/Pexels | Text: David/ArtisanEnglish.jp)

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Phrase: Put (someone) up on a pedestal

Around America and in Britain, statues were hauled down from pedestals and even thrown into harbours in some cases.

I used to think the fall of Saddam’s statue in Iraq was pretty cool.


This all just goes to show the danger of putting someone up on a pedestal.

When you do this, you tell the world you think they are perfect with no faults and should be admired.


Hindsight is 20/20, however, and as soon as we look back, we begin to see all of the problems and ask ourselves how we could be so stupid.

On second thought, we have all put someone up on a pedestal only to be let down later.

Nobody’s perfect, after all.

We all have experiences of putting someone we admired up on a pedestal and worshiping them as the best thing since sliced bread only to be let down later.

It’s the way of life.

The most important thing is that we learn from our mistakes and not be afraid to tear down who we once put up.

If you want to, you can call it creative destruction.

We create things only to destroy them later when we learn the folly of our ways.

Again, that’s just life.

Nobody is perfect, absolutely nobody. We may want to praise someone and put them up on a pedestal as the ideal example of everything we admire, but your hero is someone else’s zero.

That’s the way of the world – it’s in a constant state of flux.

What’s wonderful today will be unthinkable tomorrow.

All those white men who made their fortunes selling people into slavery were put up on pedestals and then torn down again because we finally realized that Black Lives Matter.


Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 75.

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.

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