Leaders come in many forms, with many styles and diverse qualities. There are quiet leaders and leaders one can hear in the next county. Some find strength in eloquence, some in judgment, some in courage. |
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. |
Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community. |
More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery. |
Most men and women go through their lives using no more than a fraction -- usually a rather small fraction -- of the potentialities within them. The reservoir of unused human talent and energy is vast, and learning to tap that reservoir more effectively is one of the exciting tasks ahead for humankind. |
Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. |
Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. |
Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. |
Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. |
Never underestimate the importance of nastiness to our progress thus far. If intelligence and gentleness were the chief criteria, our planet would be ruled by whales. |
One of the deepest truths about the cry of the human heart is that it is so often muted, so often a cry that is never uttered. To be sure, there are needs and feelings that we express quite openly; lying deeper are emotions we share only with loved ones, and deeper still the things we tell no one. We die with much unsaid. It is strange that members of a species renowned for communicative gifts should leave unexpressed some of their deepest yearnings, their smoldering resentments, their worries and secret hopes, their longings to serve a higher purpose. |
One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure. |
Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess. |
People run around searching for identity, but it isn't handed out free any more -- not in this transient, rootless society. Your identity is what you have committed yourself to. You build meaning into your life through your commitments -- whether to your religion, to your conception of an ethical order, to your family, group or community, to the rights of others, to unborn generations. |
Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all. |