“This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good”
2010s, 2013, Interview in La Repubblica
Context: Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. Sometimes after a meeting I want to arrange another one because new ideas are born and I discover new needs. This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good.
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Pope Francis 113
266th Pope of the Catholic Church 1936Related quotes
Source: Random Harvest

7B:14. Variant translation: The people are the most important ... and the ruler is the least important.
The people are the most important element in a nation; the spirits of the land and grain come next; the sovereign counts for the least. note: Most precious are the people; next come the spirits of land and grain; and last, the princes. note: The people are the most important ... and the ruler is the least important.
The Mencius

“The thing we must do intensely is be human together. People are more important than things.”
"Introduction" to New World or No World (1970)<!-- an anthology of environmental writing -->
General sources
Context: The thing we must do intensely is be human together. People are more important than things. We must get together. The best thing humans can have going for them is each other. We have each other. We must reject everything which humiliates us. Humans are not objects of consumption. We must develop an absolute priority of humans ahead of profit — any humans ahead of any profit. Then we will survive. … Together.

Source: Predilections by Mark Singer http://www.errolmorris.com/content/profile/singer_predilections.html

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: A god is the idea of a god. The idea of a god is a god. The idea of Glycon is Glycon, if I can enhance that idea with an anaconda and a speaking tube, fair enough. I am unlikely to start believing that this glove puppet created the universe. It’s a fiction, all gods are fiction. It’s just that I happen to think that fiction’s real. Or that it has its own reality, that is just as valid as ours. I happen to believe that most of the important things in the material world start out as fiction. That everything around us was once fiction – before there was the table there was the idea of a table, and the idea of a table before tables was fiction. This is the most important world, the world of fictional things. That’s the world where all this starts.