The 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.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
