Great Throughts Treasury

"Science does not have appropriate tools for the dissection of the spirit. How sad it would be, I thought, if we humans ultimately were to lose all sense of mystery, all sense of awe, if our left brains were utterly to dominate the right so that logic and reason triumphed over intuition and alienated us absolutely from our innermost being, from our hearts, from our souls."

"We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for eighty percent of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the twenty percent who are destroying our natural resources."

"We have the choice to use the gift of our life to make the world a better place--or not to bother."

"If we kill off the wild, then we are killing a part of our souls."

"What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make."

"The greatest danger to our future is apathy."

"Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved."

"Especially now when views are becoming more polarized, we must work to understand each other across political, religious and national boundaries."

"One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun."

"Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right."

"The hardest part of returning to a truly healthy environment may be changing the current totally unsustainable heavy-meat-eating culture of increasing numbers of people around the world. But we must try. We must make a start, one by one."

"We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love."

"The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves."

"We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources."

"And if we dare to look into those eyes, then we shall feel their suffering in our hearts. More and more people have seen that appeal and felt it in their hearts. All around the world there is an awakening of understanding and compassion, and understanding that reaches out to help the suffering animals in their vanishing homelands. That embraces hungry, sick, and desperate human beings, people who are starving while the fortunate among us have so much more than we need. And if, one by one, we help them, the hurting animals, the desperate humans, then together we shall alleviate so much of the hunger, fear, and pain in the world. Together we can bring change to the world, gradually replacing fear and hatred with compassion and love. Love for all living beings."

"I think the best evenings are when we have messages, things that make us think, but we can also laugh and enjoy each other's company. "

"Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is all right, as long your values don't change."