ON TAKING ACTION
“A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.”
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead
"What powerholders really fear is resilient, nonviolent, mass rebellion—which exposes as a lie their aura of invincibility while simultaneously removing any excuses for violent crackdowns."
Erica Chenoweth
"What You Can Do, or Dream You Can, Begin It; Boldness Has Genius, Power, and Magic in It"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“We will not solve the climate crisis with the same people and thinking that caused it.”
Clover Hogan
“We learn to fear our own potential, and fall victim to thoughts like: “I’m just one in 7.6 billion. What can I do really?” But to solve our beautiful, bright planet’s dark problems, we must refuse to be ruled by fear.”
Clover Hogan
"We, the generation that faces the next century, can add the solemn injunction 'If we don't do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.'"
Petra Kelly
"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today."
Abraham Lincoln
"I knew someone had to take the first step, and I made up my mind not to move.”
Rosa Parks
“Never say never, because limits, like fears, are often just an illusion.”
Michael Jordan
"The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
Plato
"Thinking will not overcome fear but action will."
W. Clement Stone
"There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction."
John F. Kennedy
"Action is the foundational key to all success."
Pablo Picasso
"Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world."
Joel A. Barker
"Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you."
Thomas Jefferson
"Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often."
Mark Twain
'You must take action now that will move you toward your goals. Develop a sense of urgency in your life."
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
"Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics."
Jane Addams
"It is easy to sit up and take notice. What is difficult is getting up and taking action."
Honore de Balzac
"Concern should drive us into action, not into depression."
Pythagoras
"Action is the antidote to despair."
Joan Baez
"The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
World United generated quotes:
When you are left with only one choice for survival, it doesn't matter what the odds against it are.
When threats become existential in nature, we need to get radical with solutions.
It’s only impossible if everyone agrees.
Our world is the Titanic, our complacency, the iceberg.
All progress in history has been initiated by people who didn’t understand that it wasn’t possible …or knew it was impossible but did it anyway.
Once you’ve tried everything else, try the impossible.
People fear radical change, but it’s the status quo that's the monster under your bed.
The status quo very much resembles a speeding train and a cliff.
Consider that, given the circumstance, the status quo may be far more dangerous than radical change.
When things stop working completely, get radical.
When systems stop working, the status quo is the radically dangerous idea.
The risk may appear to be in radical change, but alas, it is found smoldering and well camouflaged deep within the status quo.
The most dangerous thought is that somebody else will do it.
"Any fear of a world government ought to be tempered by an absolute terror of the status quo, featuring the three horsemen of existential dread: nuclear war, planetary destruction, and a new species of superhuman intelligence."
World United
ON WAR & PEACE
"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."
Albert Einstein, 1946
"Law is, essentially, an order for the promotion of peace. Its purpose is to assure the peaceful living together of a group of individuals in such a way that they settle their inevitable conflicts in a peaceful manner; that is, without the use of force, in conformity with an order valid for all. This order is the law."
Hans Kelsen
"When Kansas and Colorado have a quarrel over the water in the Arkansas River, they don't call out the National Guard in each state and go to war over it. They bring suit in the Supreme Court of
the United States and abide by the decision. There isn't a reason in the world why we cannot do that internationally. "
Harry Truman
"Is the world a community of peoples or a collection of sovereign states?"
Dieter Heinrich
"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Martin Luther King Jr.
"It is not enough to say 'We must not wage war.' It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but the positive affirmation of peace."
Martin Luther King Jr.
"We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but the positive affirmation of peace."
Martin Luther King Jr.
"True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."
Martin Luther King Jr.
"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
Bertrand Russell
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Albert Einstein
"If we don't end war, war will end us."
H. G. Wells
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”
Jimi Hendrix
“Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us and the world will be as one.” —John Lennon
“An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” —Mahatma Gandhi
“Peace is not the absence of conflict. It is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.”
Ronald Reagan
"When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die."
Jean-Paul Sartre
"The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own."
Aldous Huxley
"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."
Dwight D. Eisenhower
"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."
George McGovern
"War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace."
Thomas Mann
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
Voltaire
"War remains the decisive human failure."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind."
John F. Kennedy
"Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder."
Percy Bysshe Shelley
"The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations."
David Friedman
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war."
Albert Einstein
"My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth."
George Washington
"A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets."
Ludwig von Mises
"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."
Ernest Hemingway
"What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party."
Henry David Thoreau
Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."
George Orwell
"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
Albert Einstein
"Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country."
Bertrand Russell
"If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed."
Ludwig von Mises
"The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one."
Albert Einstein
"War is inevitable only if we accept it as, and thereby allow it to be, inevitable."
World United
"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism."
Noam Chomsky
"At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst."
Aristotle
"The absence of law among nation-states renders us unable to prevent war. We might as well say that it caused it."
World United
Miscellaneous
"There is no solution for civilization or even the human race, other than the creation of world government."
Albert Einstein
“It is only the way it is until we discover the new way it is and then that is the way it is until we discover the new way it is and so it goes until the world is no longer flat, electricity lights the night and shoes no longer are tied with ribbons. You see."
Bella from the film “Poor Things”
"Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable."
Bill Ayers
“I’d say it’s about as impossible as manned flight, or most revolutions; not at all.”
World United
“We have to do the impossible, it’s not like we have a choice.”
World United
“If World Federation is impossible, then so is the continued existence of Homo Sapiens.”
World United
"Yearning for the seemingly impossible is the path to human progress."
Bryant H. McGill
"Change always seems impossible until it's inevitable."
Sarah McBride
"We, the generation that faces the next century, can add the solemn injunction 'If we don't do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable."
Petra Kelly
"Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along."
Arthur C. Clarke
"All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right about face which turns us from failure to success."
Dorothea Brande
"We must make the United Nations continue to work, and to be a going concern, to see that difficulties between nations may be settled just as we settle difficulties between States here in the United States. When Kansas and Colorado fall out over the waters in the Arkansas River, they don't go to war over it; they go to the Supreme Court of the United States, and the matter is settled in a just and honorable way. There is not a difficulty in the whole world that cannot be settled in exactly the same way in a world court."
President Harry S. Truman
"We won't have a society if we destroy the environment."
Margaret Mead
"The environment is where we all meet; where we all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share."
Lady Bird Johnson
"We won't save places we don't love; we can't love places we don't know; and we can't know places we haven't learned."
Indigenous Wisdom
"The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth."
Marlee Matlin
"We won't have peace on the Earth until we make peace with the Earth."
Vandana Shiva
"The environment is where we live, where we work, and where we play."
Wilma Mankiller
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
Native American Proverb
"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land."
Aldo Leopold
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now."
Chinese Proverb
"The environment and the economy are really both two sides of the same coin. If we cannot sustain the environment, we cannot sustain ourselves."
Wangari Maathai
"What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another."
Mahatma Gandhi
"Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Albert Einstein
"The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth."
Marlee Matlin
"Nature always wears the colors of the spirit."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."
Rachel Carson
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed."
Mahatma Gandhi
"We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves."
C.S. Lewis
"Conservation means harmony between men and land."
Stewart Udall
"The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it."
Robert Swan
“I used to think that to be an environmentalist, I’d have to chain myself to trees and ride zodiacs into the path of whaling ships. But I’m a bit too word-nerdy for that. I found my place when I started investigating some of our planet’s most dangerous enemies: Apathy. Pessimism. Green-washing. Tokenism. By educating myself, I overcame my own mindset hurdles, and quickly realised that I wanted to help others do the same.”
“No one is born a leader; you learn to become one through courage and imagination. So like the young people who have not been around long enough to let society clip the wings of their imaginations, I invite you to let your courage take flight.”
“We must discard the belief that we're powerless, and realise that we are infinitely powerful.”
Clover Hogan