Jews were the first to believe that history itself has meaning and that progress, not repetition, is the law of life.
BARBARA WARDJews were the first to believe that history itself has meaning and that progress, not repetition, is the law of life.
BARBARA WARDThere 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.
BARBARA WARDThe 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.
BARBARA WARDTo 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.
BARBARA WARDI have the impression that when we talk so confidently of liberty, we are unaware of the awful … servitude of poverty when means are so small that there is literally no choice at all.
BARBARA WARDFaith will not be restored in the West because people believe it to be useful. It will return only when they find that it is true.
BARBARA WARDIf 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.
BARBARA WARDTo 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.
BARBARA WARDOur physical unity has gone far ahead of our moral unity.
BARBARA WARDWe 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.”
BARBARA WARDIt is a truism that one person who wants something is a hundred times stronger than a hundred who want to be left alone.
BARBARA WARDThere is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavour and then leave it half done.
BARBARA WARDIt is a fact of history that those who seek to withdraw from its great experiments usually end up being overwhelmed by them.
BARBARA WARDthe distinction between rich nations and poor nations is one of the great dominant political and international themes of our century.
BARBARA WARDFear can indeed be the beginning of wisdom.
BARBARA WARDman’s oldest and least reputable occupation – war.
BARBARA WARD