Famous Quotations

Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love. - Mother Teresa

Action expresses priorities. - Mohandas K. Gandhi

Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person. - Mother Teresa

If no one answers your call, walk alone. - Rabindranath Tagore

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. - James Baldwin

What happens in Egypt doesn't stay in Egypt. - Tom Friedman (columnist for The New York Times)

The power of the people is much stronger than the people in power. – Wael Ghonim, Egyptian activist/leader

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression. - W. E. B. DuBois

You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. - Christopher Columbus

A ship is safe in harbour, but that's not what ships are for. - William Shedd

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.

– Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and 3rd president of the United States

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but there is no resistance to an invasion of ideas. – Victor Hugo (Comment: Let truth be the invader … let facts be the bullets that slay every fallacy … because all that is false, and all that rests on what is false - including governments – is a house of cards that cannot stand.)

It is 30 years since we started this work. Activities that devastate the environment and societies continue unabated. Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process. In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now. - Wangari Matthai, Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

… the old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. So he kept his youth close to its softening influence. – Luther Standing Bear

My religion is kindness. – the Dalai Lama

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. - Mohandas K. Gandhi

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. - William Butler Yeats

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. - Goethe

… a lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is. – J. Krishnamurti

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. - Lao Tzu

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. – Confucius

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him ... the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope". - President John F. Kennedy, Remarks at Amherst College, October 26, 1963

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. - Leonardo da Vinci

If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. - Vincent Van Gogh

The future isn’t in the future – we’re creating it now!