You cannot change how someone thinks, but you can give them a tool to use which will lead them to think differently.
Nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerating system. If we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.
It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a ‘higher standard of living than any have ever known.’ It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival.
We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.
In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.
Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.
When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie.
The man who is most aggressive in teaching tolerance is the most intolerant of all: he wants a world full of people too timid and ashamed to really disagree with anything.
It is a noble responsibility to not back down when you know that you know that you know that you are right.
There are two circumstances that lead to arrogance: one is when you’re wrong and you can’t face it; the other is when you’re right and nobody else can face it.
If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you’ll see your rivals scrambling for second place.
The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.
Disasters work like alarm clocks to the world, hence God allows them. They are shouting, ‘Wake up! Love! Pray!
One who enjoys finding errors will then start creating errors to find.
I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.
A lonely day is God’s way of saying that he wants to spend some quality time with you.
In writing, punctuation plays the role of body language. It helps readers hear you the way you want to be heard.
A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.
Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.
Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
The best advice I can give anybody about going out into the world is this: Don’t do it. I have been out there. It is a mess.
Feel good about linking hands in human chain for good causes.
Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
Life seemed to be an educator’s practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.
I frankly admit to not knowing who I am. This is why I refuse to buy clothes that will tell people who I want them to think I am.
The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
Solidarity between women can be a powerful force of change, and can influence future development in ways favourable not only to women but also to men.
All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face.
Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.
Everybody has to die, Firdaus. I will die, and you will die. The important thing is how to live until you die.
I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one.
Many people come here and they think my apartment is a poor relative to my name. But you cannot be radical and have money, it’s impossible.
Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it more holistic.
I am becoming more radical with age. I have noticed that writers, when they are old, become milder. But for me it is the opposite. Age makes me more angry.
War criminals in the U.S. and Israel are not punished: no international court has the courage to put them on trial.
The feminists who are aware of the effects of patriarchy realize that we are all in the same boat from the dangers of patriarchy, and that the oppression of women is universal.
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is ‘The Book of British Birds,’ and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.
In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.
I attacked Dawkins’s book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.
Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.
Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.
Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.
Children. Nothing could be more simple – or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves – and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. And so we go on treating children as we ourselves were treated, calling this “reality,” or saying bitterly, “If I could put up with it, they can too.
If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued.
Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.
Children are not only extremely good at learning; they are much better at it than we are.
We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do for even an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn’t interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Hardly any.
The danger of letting people ask, “Is this the best way to do this job?” is that after a while they may ask, “Is this job worth doing?
To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid.
We don’t have to make human beings smart. They are born smart. All we have to do is stop doing the things that made them stupid.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.
Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.
Patience is the most necessary quality for business, many a man would rather you heard his story than grant his request.
I think all animals have souls. I feel certain that if we have souls, octopuses have souls, too. If you grant something a soul, it demands a certain level of sacredness. Look around us. The world is holy. It is full of souls.
The only legitimate right to govern is an express grant of power from the governed.
Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn’t matter.
Maybe climate change is a threat, and maybe climate change has been tarted up by climatologists trolling for research grant cash. It doesn’t matter.
The serenity prayer, ‘God grant me the strength to accept…’ That’s a prayer that’s actually in my car. I say it every day.
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
We want to take our rugged individualism and turn it into a rugged covenantalism.
Only the incomprehensibilities of a Triune God could explain the impossibilities of human philosophy.
I believe that in this way the teacher is the prophet of the true god and the usherer in of the true kingdom of god.
Without freedom, the family and faith cannot survive. Without faith, we will see freedom and family languish. And without family, man will give up on a generational commitment to faith and freedom.
We destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education with social.
Freedom cannot exist without morality, and morality can only be defined by the God who, by definition is the source of morality.
While the world is “entertaining themselves to death,” we are working and resting. This is the essence of the fourth commandment. We work for God and we rest in God.
A real hansom-cab took him from the station to Trinity College: the vehicle, it seemed, had been waiting there especially for him, desperately holding out against extinction till that moment, and then gladly dying out to join side whiskers and the Large Copper.
I belong to the scarce minority of artists who work in good faith, around whom the phenomenal world vanishes, as it happens to the mystics when they give themselves to prayer.
Education is the preparation of a child intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and physically for life and for eternity.
It’s really important for people who are HIV positive to reach out to let other people know that they can be tested, they can find out they can still live a life — a positive life, a happy life.
Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.
I have found the most valuable thing in my wallet is my library card.
Let the first rule of right prayer then be, to have our heart and mind framed as becomes those who are entering into converse with God.
Leadership is not about popularity, it is about doing what is right.
The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone.
As parents, the most important thing we can do is read to our children early and often. Reading is the path to success in school and life. When children learn to love books, they learn to love learning.
Libraries offer, for free, the wisdom of the ages–and sages–and, simply put, there’s something for everyone inside.
I think there are a lot of reasons to be critical of the media in America.
We all, parents, educators, community leaders, and every… citizen, need to come together to find new ways to engage children with the natural environment.
