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

The gaps in power, the gaps in wealth, the gaps in ideology which hold the nations apart also make up the abyss into which mankind can fall to annihilation.

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.

It is a truism that one person who wants something is a hundred times stronger than a hundred who want to be left alone.

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.

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.

A law against hating Jews is usually the beginning of the end for the Jews.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.

Ending racial discrimination in jury selection can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely.

Any discrimination, like sharp turns in a road, becomes critical because of the tremendous speed at which we are traveling into the high-tech world of a service economy.

Racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional. All provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting such discrimination must yield to this principle.

I agree with the (Supreme Court’s) holding that racial discrimination in higher education admissions will be illegal in 25 years. They are illegal now.

The real Hindu vision is that nobody will be discriminated against or favoured. Everyone is equal.

I used to be homophobic, but as I got older, I realized that wasn’t the way to do things. I don’t discriminate against anybody for their sexual preference, for their skin color… that’s immature.