Fear can indeed be the beginning of wisdom.
BARBARA WARDFear can indeed be the beginning of wisdom.
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 WARDJews were the first to believe that history itself has meaning and that progress, not repetition, is the law of life.
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 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.
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 WARDThere is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavour and then leave it half done.
BARBARA WARDThe modern world is not given to uncritical admiration. It expects its idols to have feet of clay and can be reasonably sure that the press and camera will report their exact dimensions.
BARBARA WARDWe have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.
BARBARA WARDman’s oldest and least reputable occupation – war.
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 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 WARDthe 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.
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 WARDthe distinction between rich nations and poor nations is one of the great dominant political and international themes of our century.
BARBARA WARDOur physical unity has gone far ahead of our moral unity.
BARBARA WARD