Don’t depend on governments or corporations to fix problems. Social revolutions are led by passionate individuals and that’s what makes the difference.
The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded.
It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary. to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
The most intractable problem today is not pollution or technology or war; but the lack of belief that the future is very much in the hands of the individual.
Human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.
If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.
A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
If the future is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.
There is no evidence that suggests women are naturally better at caring for children… with the fact of child-bearing out of the centre of attention, there is even more reason for treating girls first as human beings, then as women.
It was not until we saw the picture of the earth, from the moon, that we realized how small and how helpless this planet is – something that we must hold in our arms and care for.
Children not only have to learn what their parents learned in school, but also have to learn how to learn. This has to be recognized as a new problem which is only partly solved.
