Great Throughts Treasury

"In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world." - Nicholas D. Kristof, fully Nicholas Donabet Kristof

"Supreme happiness cannot be found in the world; but we need not run away to the jungle to seek Him (God) who is the Giver of all happiness. In this jungle of daily life, we may find Him in the cave of silence. Remember, the only man who is happy is the man who sits in the temple of silence and shuts out all storms or worries. Nothing can challenge the quietness of his soul." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"Those who are unconquered in spirit are the real successes in life. If you can so train or condition your mind that you are content regardless of what you have or do not have, and if you can stand the challenge of all your trials and remain calm-that is true happiness." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"Fixing the intractable problems besetting the world will require a convergence of social intelligence and natural science, two qualities traditional politics lack... The world seems to be looking for the big solution, which is itself part of the problem, since the most effective solutions are both local and systemic... Although the movement may appear inchoate or naively ambitious, its underlying structure and communication techniques can, at times, create a collective social response that can challenge any institution in the world... What its members do share is a basic set of fundamental understandings about the earth, how it functions, and the necessity of fairness and equity for all people dependent on the planet’s life-giving systems." - Paul Hawken

"No one ever loses anyone. We are all one soul that needs to continue growing and developing in order for the world to carry on and for us all to meet once again… No one is alone in their troubles; there is always someone else thinking, rejoicing, or suffering in the same way, and that gives us the strength to confront the challenge before us… No one lights a lamp in order to hide it behind the door: the purpose of light is to create more light, to open people's eyes, to reveal the marvels around… No one places her dreams in the hands of those who might destroy them… No one owns anything. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them. And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no point wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine. " - Paulo Coelho

"We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs - or we don't. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious - to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs - is the best use of our human lives. " - Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown

"The greatest challenge to organizations is the balance between continuity and change. You need both. At different times, the balance is slightly more over here, or slightly more over there, but you need both. And balance is basically the greatest task in leadership. Organizations have to have continuity, and yet if there is not enough new challenge, not enough change, they become empty bureaucracies, awfully fast." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"The productivity of the newly dominant groups in the work force, knowledge workers and service workers, will be the biggest and toughest challenge facing managers in the developed countries for decades to come. And serious work on this daunting task has only begun. " - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"A man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths. The man who always knows what people cannot do, but never sees what they can do, will undermine the spirit of the organisation. Of course, a manager should have a clear grasp of the limitations of his people, but he should see these as limitations on what they can do, and as a challenge to them to do better." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work...or by service work. The productivity of knowledge work--still abysmally low--will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes, and with them dignity and status, to non knowledge people." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"Commitment to the truth… means a relentless willingness to root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing what is, and to continually challenge our theories of why things are the way they are. It means continually broadening our awareness. It also means continually deepening our understanding of the structures underlying current events." - Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge

"Animal Liberation will require greater altruism on the part of human beings than any other liberation movement. The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or boycotts. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that morality counts for nothing when it clashes with self-interest, as the most cynical of poets and philosophers have always said? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels and terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible? " - Peter Singer

"Virtue, thou in rags, may challenge more than vice set off with all the trim of greatness." - Philip Massinger

"Good manners, to those one does not love, are no more a breach of truth, than "your humble servant," at the bottom of a challenge is; they are universally agreed upon, and understand to be things of course. They are necessary guards of the decency and peace of society." - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

"To bring the sublime into the mundane is the greatest challenge there is. " - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan

"Fortunately for all the societies which do not perish in this sort of transition from one basic order to another, the disintegration process often generates the emergence of mobilization of forces opposed to it. Weak and insignificant at the beginning, these forces slowly grow and then start not only to fight the disintegration but also to plan and then to build a new sociocultural order which can meet more adequately the gigantic challenge of the critical transition and of the post-transitory future. This process of emergence and growth of the forces planning and building the new order has also appeared and is slowly developing now… The epochal struggle between the increasingly sterile and destructive forces of the dying sensate order and the creative forces of the emerging, integral, sociocultural order marks all areas of today’s culture and social life, and deeply affects the way of life of every one of us." - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work." - Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL

"It would be simplistic to say that Divine Providence caused the fall of Communism. In a certain sense Communism as a system fell by itself. It fell as a consequence of its own mistakes and abuses. It proved to be a medicine more dangerous than the disease itself. It did not bring about true social reform, yet it did become a powerful threat and challenge to the entire world. But it fell by itself, because of its own inherent weakness." - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL

"Pervading nationalism imposes its dominion on man today in many different forms and with an aggressiveness that spares no one. The challenge that is already with us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new form of slavery." - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL

"Today's vote underlined that as the strongest bloc in parliament, it is up to us to build a government. We are faced with a challenge that is difficult, but solvable. " - Angela Merkel, fully Angela Dorothea Merkel, née Kasner

"However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending, and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat. In an ever more economically unequal world, where so many of the affluent devote their lives to ghostly pursuits like stock trading, image making, and opinion polling, real work, in the old-fashioned sense of labor that engages hand as well as eye, that tires the body and directly alters the physical world tends to vanish from sight. The feminists of my generation tried to bring some of it into the light of day, but, like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off in mid-sentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled. Sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job. " - Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander

"Often times when you face such an overwhelming challenge as global climate change, it can be somewhat daunting - it's kind of like trying to lose weight, which I know something about." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"The challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. " - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"Today's electronic village has certainly complicated the challenge of parenting. When It Takes a Village was published, the Internet was largely the province of scientists; no one owned an iPod; and cell phones weighed as much as bricks. Innovations are now coming at an exponentially faster pace, and media saturates our kids' lives as never before. Many of these changes are for the good: when I was in college, a phone call home was rare and a flight home, a once-a-year luxury. Now I know parents who see and speak to their kids every day by computer and video hookups, and I think how much Bill would have loved that when he was campaigning. But knowing that one third of kids under six have TVs in their rooms, that the fashion industry is marketing its latest styles to preteen girls, and that predators stalk our children through the World Wide Web makes me thankful to have raised Chelsea in a less media-saturated time." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe. If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the skeptics." - Raymond Aron, fully Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron

"Here we are, with tremendous opportunity before us. I challenge you to get to work to bring us up to a higher level of service. Let us share with others the benefits we have gained for ourselves." - Ralph C. Smedley

"[Washington is] corporate-occupied territory... We need more political and civic energies inside the campaign to challenge this two-party duopoly that's trending toward one-party districts all over the country." - Ralph Nader

"One of the justifications for this campaign is to preserve and expand the right of third parties and independent candidates to challenge the two-party duopoly system... I see it as a civil liberties issue of free speech." - Ralph Nader

"Never give up: There are certain times that you think, OK, you have beaten me down to my knees. And now the challenge is, I am on my knees and you keep on beating me down. And the question is, are you going to keep beating me all the way to the ground or will I find a way to struggle my way back on to my feet." - Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch

"The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space." - Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West

"Revolution is a wasteful, destructive, and inhuman engine of political change. It must be allowed to happen if there is nothing better, but the great challenge to human ingenuity is to find alternative paths to economic and political reconstruction, which can bring basic changes without the massive use of violence. The societies of the- Third World can ill afford the economic and human costs of prolonged civil war. But virtually all of the thinking to date about revolutionizing underdeveloped societies through technology rather than through violence has been designed to serve the political interests of the donor country. The avoidance of revolution has been an end in itself, and very little commitment has been made to the achievement of radical political change through nonviolent means in societies needing revolution. A great nation has an inherent problem, and possibly an insoluble one, in devising a strategy for helping another society to remake its political life without injecting its own interests and values and without coming to dominate the weak." - Richard Barnet, fully Richard Jackson Barnet

"It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests." - Richard Dawkins

"The ultimate test of a nation's character is not how it responds to adversity in war but how it meets the challenge of peace." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"It amazes me how people are often more willing to act based on little or no data than to use data that is a challenge to assemble." - Robert J. Shiller, fully Robert James "Bob" Shiller

"The people whom the sons and daughters find it hard to understand are the fathers and mothers, but young people can get on very well with the grandfathers and grandmothers." - Simeon Strunsky

"The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"They have answered the stirrings of liberty with brute force, killings, mass arrests, and the setting up of concentration camps." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"As a columnist noted in late 1975, ‘Today it is almost as though the war never happened. Americans have somehow blocked it out of their consciousness. They don’t talk about it. They don’t talk about its consequences.’ Vietnam was barely mentioned in the presidential campaign of 1976. It took us nearly a decade before we even began to face the sacrifices, mistakes, and costs of the Vietnam War, before we began to build monuments, make documentaries and films, embrace the soldiers who fought the war, and capture its lessons.’" - Ronald A. Heifetz

"As we shall see, a strategy of leadership to accomplish adaptive work accounts for several conditions and values that are consonant with the demands of a democratic society. In addition to reality testing, these include respecting conflict, negotiation, and a diversity of views within a community; increasing community cohesion; developing norms of responsibility-taking, learning, and innovation; and keeping social distress within a bearable range." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"For Gandhi to challenge these ways of life demanded knowing them deeply, by experience, by operating close to the frontline, where the stakeholders of India lived. Gandhi could speak to people, to their hopes, fears, weaknesses, and needs because he spent time knowing them. He could touch and inspire people because they touched and inspired him." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"Having been denied formal authority roles in most societies, some women have learned strategies for leading without authority, and some have learned not to try leading at all. The same can be said of many disempowered groups." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"It should be obvious from reflecting on our daily lives that authority relationships are enormously productive. The human capacity for generating complex systems of authority is essential to our extraordinary adaptability and creativity as social creatures." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"The absence of authority enables one to deviate from the norms of authoritative decision-making." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"The term ‘holding environment’ originated in psychoanalysis to describe the relationship between the therapist and the patient. The therapist ‘holds’ the patient in a process of developmental learning in a way that has some similarities to the way a mother and father hold their newborn and maturing children. For a child, the holding environment serves as a containing vessel for the developmental steps, problems, crises, and stresses of growing up." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"I haven't seen the book, I have seen the passages that were compared between the two books, I must say I don't accept the idea that this could have been accidentally or innocently done. The passages are too many and the similarities are too extensive." - Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie

"Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young." - Samuel Ullman

"It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"On the day of my conversion Charity entered into my heart and with it a yearning to forget self always; thenceforward I was happy." - Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL

"Spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow, because science must always test and measure, and much of reality and human experience is immeasurable." - Starhawk, born Miriam Simos NULL