Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Many savage nations worship trees, and I really think my first feeling would be one of delight and interest rather than of surprise, if some day when I am alone in the woods one of the trees were to speak to me.
It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality.
Here are the three great questions which in life we have over and over again to answer: Is it right or wrong? Is it true or false? Is it beautiful or ugly? Our education ought to help us to answer these questions.
A truly global economy, as opposed to the multinational economy of the recent past, will require concessions of national power ... that seemed impossible a few years ago and which even now we can but partly imagine.
Don't be afraid of showing affection. Be warm and tender, thoughtful and affectionate. Men are more helped by sympathy than by service. Love is more than money, and a kind word will give more pleasure than a present.
I have learned that the ethics of the so-called markets can be different from what we learn at school. In day-to-day life you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term it always pays off to be ethical.
Information is a business in itself. It is also something that has made control impossible ... you cannot get customers to accept prices in one place when they know there's a better deal elsewhere. It's a whole new world.
The surplus wealth we have gained to some extent at least belongs to our fellow beings; we are only the temporary custodians of our fortunes, and let us be careful that no just complaint can be made against our stewardship.
Everything is in place - after 500 years - to build a true 'new world' in the Western Hemisphere... And what happens if we don't pass NAFTA? I truly don't think that 'criminal' would be too strong a word for rejecting NAFTA.
I leave everything to the young men. You've got to give youthful men authority and responsibility if you're going to build up an organization. Otherwise you'll always be the boss yourself and you won't leave anything behind you.
I think that the best hope for peace and prosperity in the world is greater cooperation among nations, which in turn will be produced if both our governments and the people of our countries travel more and get to know each other better.
The mechanical and social achievements of our day must not blind our eyes to the fact that, in all that relates to man, his nature and aspirations, we have added little or nothing to what has been so finely said by the great men of old.
The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich.
As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny.
Faith receives. Love gives. One must not receive without faith. One must not give without love. Therefore, in order to receive, we believe, and in order to give truly, we love. But if one gives without love, he does not benefit from such giving.
I suspect that many corporations have begun to understand that they have an important role to play in the lives of their communities, and that allocating funds to support local groups helps them discharge that function and also burnish their image.
My own interest in art was because of my mother. My father didn't like contemporary art, so he didn't give her large sums to spend. So, she began buying prints and drawings. During my school days, I remember sitting in on many of the early meetings.
I am convinced that material things can contribute a lot to making one's life pleasant, but, basically, if you do not have very good friends and relatives who matter to you, life will be really empty and sad and material things cease to be important.
The greatest testimony to the human spirit that I'm witnessing now is the fact that people still come back to work, after all that has been done to them. They are still willing to participate for a more positive future if they would be sincerely invited.
Mother liked beauty wherever she found it, and she found it in many different places, both in nature and in contemporary art. And that's where they pretty much parted company. Father... anything that was abstract would to him automatically be not very good.
Maybe I was accepted to Harvard only because of my tennis skills, since I definitively had no great academic achievements. I was 17 and only thought about surfing and playing tennis. I had almost never left Rio de Janeiro and had never been to the United States.
Happy indeed is the naturalist: to him the seasons come round like old friends; to him the birds sing: as he walks along, the flowers stretch out from the hedges, or look up from the ground, and as each year fades away, he looks back on a fresh store of happy memories.
A pearl, even if it is cast down into the mud, is not despised. And if one covers it with balsam, it does not become more valuable. But it is always valuable to its owner. It is the same with the Sons of God: wherever They may be, They are still of value to Their Father.
We often hear of bad weather, but in reality no weather is bad. It is all delightful, though in different ways. Some weather may be bad for farmers or crops, but for man all kinds are good. Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating.
The Enlightenment faith that things are getting a little bit better each decade becomes difficult to support. People recognized that there had just been a war that was worse than the war of 1812, and worse than the Revolution; things were clearly not getting better and better.
There'll be a growing disparity between economics and politics. An economy that grows so rapidly is intractably global. On the other hand, the current political system is intractably national. So there is a growing dichotomy between a global economy and locally based politics.
This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long - We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.
I walk into all these organizations, and I'm always puzzled when I realize that people still want to be there. Most people really want to love their organizations. We need that level of commitment ... Yet organizations have done very little to deserve that kind of staying-power.
Some people just think utopians are idiots who are imagining rivers of candy and not really engaging with the world's ills, and sometimes that's surely the case, but I think that imagining the perfected society is a way of expressing your disgust with the current state of affairs.
Only when we rid ourselves of passions and lust and put the desires of flesh under the control of Spirit, only then we accept the cross and follow Christ. And "withdrawal from the world" is nothing but the destruction of passions and manifestation of the innermost life in Christ.
They're people who probably imagine that they would have had a better time in the past. I wouldn't imagine you'd encounter a lot of black people saying 'Oh, the '50s, that was when America was great.' It's very dangerous because the past was imperfect, and you can't go back anyway.
Many organizations are now trying to walk under the banner of The Learning Organization, realizing that knowledge is our most important product ... But the only place that I've seen it is in the Army. As one colonel said, "We realized a while ago that it's better to learn than be dead."
If we had a truth-in Government act comparable to the truth-in-advertising law, every note issued by the Treasury would be obliged to include a sentence stating: This note will be redeemed with the proceeds from an identical note which will be sold to the public when this one comes due.
All those who love Nature she loves in return, and will richly reward, not perhaps with the good things, as they are commonly called, but with the best things of this world-not with money and titles, horses and carriages, but with bright and happy thoughts, contentment and peace of mind.
The three short years I spent at Harvard, where I lived with excellent people, taught me not only that I must know how to choose my partners but also that choosing excellent partners is a skill you can learn. Obviously, when you spend time with the best, you learn how to choose among them.
For more than 40 years, I have advocated the creation of a 'round the clock' community. This would mean, at the least, housing, schools and shops of various kinds alongside the commercial buildings. That kind of community had appeared in lower Manhattan in nascent form before Sept. 11, 2001.
If the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) raises the hackles of the conspiracy theorists, the Bilderberg meetings must induce apocalyptic visions of omnipotent international bankers plotting with unscrupulous government officials to impose cunning schemes on an ignorant and unsuspecting world.
The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. Liberty is not foolproof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and attainable, and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are beyond our power to change.
Countries don't go out of business....The infrastructure doesn't go away, the productivity of the people doesn't go away, the natural resources don’t go away. And so their assets always exceed their liabilities, which is the technical reason for bankruptcy. And that's very different from a company.
I worry that I may have overstated the impact of Civil War on the utopians. By the time the Civil War comes, most of the communities were quite separated from the wider American society. Their rhetoric is still about transforming the world, but they're not having that much traffic with their neighbors.
The one who wants to love God has to take care about the purity of the soul, first of all. This purity is attained through conquering the passions. (The one who has not conquered the passions cannot enter) the chaste and pure region of the heart. Do not hate a sinner, for we all are to be responsible.
We are all great landed proprietors, if we only knew it. What we lack is not land, but the power to enjoy it. Moreover, this great inheritance has the additional advantage that it entails no labor, requires no management. The landlord has the trouble, but the landscape belongs to everyone who has eyes to see it.
We're not in cultures which support learning; we're in cultures that give us the message consistently: "Don't mess up, don't make mistakes, don't make the boss look bad, don't give us any surprises." So we're asking for a kind of predictability, control, respect, and compliance that has nothing to do with learning.
Love seems to beautify and inspire all nature. It raises the earthly caterpillar into the ethereal butterfly, it paints the feathers in spring, it lights the glowworm's lamp, it wakens the song of birds, and inspires the poet's lay. Even inanimate Nature seems to feel the spell, and flowers glow with the richest colours.
Money can add very much to one's ability to lead a constructive life, not only pleasant for oneself, but, hopefully, beneficial to others. My grandfather, along with Carnegie, was a pioneer in philanthropy, which my father then practiced on a very large scale. The Christian ethic played an essential part in my upbringing.
Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.
I don't recall that I have said and I don't think that I really feel that we need a world government. We need governments of the world that work together and collaborate. But, I can't imagine that there would be any likelihood or even that it would be desirable to have a single government elected by the people of the world.
I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education. In order to appreciate cultures of another nation, one needs to go there, know the people and mingle with the culture of that country. One way to do that, if one is lucky enough, is to buy things from those cultures.
So there's that change of general consciousness, and then there's this boom after the war, this expansion into the West. It was like the 1950s. The American economy was pumping at top speed. The kinds of people who would move into these communities and organize their lives around a utopian dream now had dreams about the West.
The religious and irreligious are agreeing with each other almost all the time. Their rhetoric is the same, and their plans are the same. Through slightly different interpretations, they all think the same thing is going to happen, that the Earth is going to be perfected and that humans are going to do the work of perfecting it.