“the wealthy white western minority of the world could not hope to prosper if most of the rest of mankind were foundering in hopeless poverty. Islands of plenty in a vast ocean of misery never have been a good recipe for commercial success.”

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.

Our physical unity has gone far ahead of our moral unity.

If a man has lived in a tradition which tells him that nothing can be done about his human condition, to believe that progress is possible may well be the greatest revolution of all.

Business shouldn’t be like sports, separating the men from the women.

The raw material from which social institutions are fashioned is always more or less recalcitrant and any human society will tend to produce a caricature of itself.

Jews were the first to believe that history itself has meaning and that progress, not repetition, is the law of life.

To me, one of the proofs that there is a moral governance in the universe is the fact that when people and governments work intelligently and far-sightedly for the good of others, they achieve their own prosperity, too.

Fear can indeed be the beginning of wisdom.

It is a fact of history that those who seek to withdraw from its great experiments usually end up being overwhelmed by them.

There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavour and then leave it half done. This is what the West has done with its colonial system. It shook all the societies in the world loose from their old moorings. But it seems indifferent whether or not they reach safe harbour in the end.

To act without rapacity, to use knowledge with wisdom, to respect interdependence, to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival.

We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that “we choose death.”

in modern society, fear of unemployment remains the darkest of the shadows thrown by the past. In an industrial order, a man out of work is almost a man out of life.

Every single ancient wisdom and religion will tell you the same thing – don’t live entirely for yourself, live for other people. Don’t get stuck inside your own ego, because it will become a prison in no time flat.

It is very much easier for a rich man to invest and grow richer than for the poor man to begin investing at all. And this is also true of nations.

man’s oldest and least reputable occupation – war.

The custom is often noticed in the Old Testament, and still prevails in the east, and in some of the newly discovered South Sea Islands.

Judging is a lonely job in which a man is, as near as may be, an island entire.

The mother says to her daughter: The heart is an island. To reach it, You must cross salt water. This is what the daughter fears: That joy, like sorrow, Must be reached by shipwreck, Tossed on the flotsam of tears.

No man is an island unto himself.

Life is a journey through the sea between the Islands of birth and success.

My desire was not to pass any island without taking possession, so that, one having been taken, the same may be said of all.

What a beautiful island we live on! The sky has a permanent haze.

From sorrow to sorrow love crosses its islands and establishes roots that are watered by weeping.