If economic progress means that we become anonymous cogs in some great machine, then progress is an empty promise.
Learning is experience understood in tranquility.
Talent comes with an individual name tag.
The world by and large has to be reinvented.
There is as far as I know, no example in history, of any state voluntarily ceding power from the centre to its constituent parts.
Passion is born of vague hopes.
Creativity is born of chaos, even if it is somewhat difficult to glimpse the possibilities in the midst of the confusion.
Home is the first school for us all, a school with no fixed curriculum, no quality control, no examinations, no teacher training.
The sobering thought is that individuals and societies are not, in the end, remembered for how they made their money, but for how they spent it.
Villages are small and personal, and their inhabitants have names, characters, and personalities. What more appropriate concept on which to base our institutions of the future than the ancient social unit whose flexibility and strength substained human society through millenia?
Forget land, buildings, or machines-the real source of wealth today is intelligence, applied intelligence. We talk glibly of “intellectual property” without taking on board what it really means. It isn’t just patent rights and brand names; it is the brains of the place.
An economy that adds value through information, ideas, and intelligence-the Three I Economy-offers a way out of the apparent clash between material growth and environmental resources.
We are all prisoners of our past. It is hard to think of things except in the way we have always thought of them. But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.
We need to have faith in the future to make sense of the present.
Ordinary citizens are so accepting of what is going on, grumbling when their material interests were affected, but seemingly accepting the spiritual poverty so characteristic of today.
We learn by reflecting on what has happened. The process seldom works in reverse, although most educational processes assume that it does. We hope that we can teach people how to live before they live, or how to manage before they manage.
Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.
I believe that a lot of our striving after the symbols and levers of success is due to a basic insecurity, a need to prove ourselves. That done, grown up at last, we are free to stop pretending.
The world may admire the truth-tellers, but few will want to employ them.
Anything that takes us out of our comfort zones for a while can act as a reminder that the past we are used to may not be our best future.
Democracy assumes that individuals must be allowed to be the best judge of their own interests, even if they often seem to be misguided. Governments are not there to tell us what to believe or think, they are there to represent our beliefs, and to translate them into laws or regulations.