Quotes about the world
page 79

David Mitchell photo

“A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.”

The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, Monday, 13th January —, p. 528
Cloud Atlas (2004)

Alan Shepard photo

“We do not discover mathematical truths; we remember them from our passages through this world outside our own.”

Ivar Ekeland (1944) French mathematician

Source: The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006), Chapter 1, Keeping The Beat, p. 6.

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature…The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Media as the New Nature, 1969, p. 14
1960s

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Max Beckmann photo
Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi photo

“Do not be worried about the events and earthquakes that have occurred. Know that God created this world as a test … The supreme leader holds a great many of the blessings God has given us and at a time of such uncertainties our eyes must turn to him.”

Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi (1934) Member of Iran's Assembly of Experts

"Discontented Muslim clergy challenge Iran's supreme leader behind scenes" by Bill Meyer in World News at Cleveland.com (8 July 2009) http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2009/07/discontented_muslim_clergy_cha.html

Lydia Canaan photo

“I was born in a world of borders, barricades, and demarcation lines. And since I could not change the world around me, I created a world inside me, and I held on to it. It was a world with no borders, barricades, or demarcation lines. It was a world of hope.”

Lydia Canaan Lebanese singer-songwriter

From Hostage to Injustice http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBYo3oXInGU, a speech delivered at the 26th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, June 17, 2014

Bergen Evans photo

“[Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on.”

Bergen Evans (1904–1978) American lexicographer

Bergen Evans, in his Dictionary of Quotations

Edward Bulwer-Lytton photo

“A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician

The Disowned (1828), Chapter xxxiii.

Steve Killelea photo

“Once conclusions about the economic benefits of peace are drawn, it may be possible to transform the world through business-led initiatives, thereby helping to achieve peace and creating the environment that will make future sustainability possible.”

Steve Killelea (1949) Australian businessman

The Study of Industries that Prosper in Peace – the ‘Peace Industry’ http://www.visionofhumanity.org/images/content/Documents/2008%20GPi%20Discussion%20Paper.pdf (2008)

Ta-Nehisi Coates photo
Alexandra Kollontai photo
Tommy Douglas photo
Woodrow Wilson photo

“Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

An unpublished paper of 1907, as quoted in The Rising American Empire (1960) by Richard Warner Van Alstyne, p. 201; also quoted in On Power and Ideology (1987) by Noam Chomsky; accounts of this as being from a lecture of 15 April 1907 seem to be incorrect.
1900s

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
William Penn photo

“It is admirable to consider how many Millions of People come into, and go out of the World, Ignorant of themselves, and of the World they have lived in.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

1
Fruits of Solitude (1682), Part I

Benoît Mandelbrot photo
Phillip Blond photo
William Wordsworth photo
Hugo Chávez photo
James Traficant photo

“The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, "open your mind to me and I'll take you to another world."”

Alexei Maxim Russell (1976) Canadian writer

from official website http://www.whynot-world.com

Newton Lee photo

“The more information that countries and peoples have about each other, the better and safer the world will become.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Willa Cather photo
Bernard Lewis photo
Johann Hari photo
Alexander von Humboldt photo
Richard Wurmbrand photo
Joseph Smith, Jr. photo
Steven Erikson photo
François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“We should often be ashamed of our very best actions if the world only saw the motives which caused them.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=vQEzAAAAMAAJ&q=%22We+should+often+be+ashamed+of+our+very+best+actions+if+the+world+only+saw+the+motives+which+caused+them%22&pg=PA47#v=onepage
Nous aurions souvent honte de nos plus belles actions, si le monde voyoit tous les motifs qui les produisent.
http://books.google.com/books?id=X8akMrBxYegC&q=%22Nous%22+%22aurions+souvent+honte+de+nos+plus+belles+Actions+si+le+monde+voyoit+tous+les+motifs+qui%22+%22les+produisent%22&pg=PA232#v=onepage
Maxim 409.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Tom Petty photo

“But not me, baby,
I've got you to save me.
Aw, yer so bad.
Best thing I've ever had.
In a world gone mad,
Yer so bad.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Yer So Bad, written with Jeff Lynne
Lyrics, Full Moon Fever (1989)

Joshua Casteel photo
David Foster Wallace photo
Daniel Dennett photo
Richard Rorty photo

“To abjure the notion of the “truly human” is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.”

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) American philosopher

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), p. 35

Robert Maynard Hutchins photo
Charles Dudley Warner photo

“There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.”

Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900) American writer

Studies in the South and West with Comments on Canada (1889).

Adi Da Samraj photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Floris Cohen photo
Friedrich Hayek photo
Jonathan Franzen photo

“One of the consolations of dying… Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically.”

Jonathan Franzen (1959) novelist

"Jonathan Franzen Warns Ebooks are Corroding Values," http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/30/jonathan-franzen-ebooks-values The Guardian (Jan 30, 2012).

Robert G. Ingersoll photo
W. Somerset Maugham photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Ben Harper photo

“The world awakens on the run
And will soon be earning
With hopes of better days to come
It's a morning yearning.”

Ben Harper (1969) singer-songwriter and musician

Morning Yearning.
Song lyrics, Both Sides of the Gun (2006)

Ulrike Meinhof photo
Daniel Johns photo

“Sex, drugs, and image is just enough to get you by in the real world”

Daniel Johns (1979) Australian musician

Dearest Helpless
Song lyrics, Neon Ballroom (1999)

Garry Kasparov photo

“Anatoly Karpov and I donated the prize fund from our 1986 world championship match to the Chernobyl victim relief fund.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

Source: 2010s, Winter is Coming (2015), p. 17

B.K.S. Iyengar photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Jesse Jackson photo

“If my mind can conceive it, if my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it because I am somebody!
Respect me! Protect me! Never neglect me!
I am somebody!
My mind is a pearl! I can learn anything in the world!
Nobody can save us, from us, for us, but us!
I can learn. It is possible.
I ought to learn. It is moral.
I must learn. It is imperative.”

Jesse Jackson (1941) African-American civil rights activist and politician

Speech at Anderson College in Anderson, Indiana (4 March 1979), quoted in Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith (1987) by David G. Myers and Malcolm A. Jeeves. The first sentence is a modification of a quote by Napoleon Hill: "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve."

Tawakkol Karman photo
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis photo
Lawrence Kudlow photo

“Art is not merely a decorative enhancement of our lives but a sign of our desire to live in the world fully and honestly.”

Jan Zwicky (1955) Canadian philosopher

Governor Generals Award for Poetry, Nov. 1999.
Other

Bill Mollison photo
William Ewart Gladstone photo

“So long as there is this book, there will be no peace in the world.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Holding up a Qur'an in the House of Commons; quoted in Rafiq Zakaria, Muhammad and the Quran (Penguin Books, 1991), p. 59.
«Gladstone...threw the Quran into a closet and said, 'There will be no quiet in the world as long as this remains.'» Reported in Army Officers in Arab Politics and Society (1970) by Eliezer Bee̓ri, p. 367.
Disputed
Variant: "As long as a copy of this accursed book survives there can be no justice in the world." Quoted in Paul G. Lauren, ed., The China Hands' Legacy: Ethics and Diplomacy (Westview Press, 1987), p. 136.

John Donne photo
John Davidson photo

“One must become
Fanatic – be a wedge – a thunder-bolt
To smite a passage through the close-grained world.”

John Davidson (1857–1909) Scottish poet

Smith (Glasgow: Wilson, 1888) p. 33

Frederick William Robertson photo

“This world is given as a prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world is truer still of the world to come.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 205.

Michio Kushi photo

“If you think of harming someone, this is the same as actually doing it, in terms of the spiritual world, since the spiritual world is vibrational, which includes thinking.”

Michio Kushi (1926–2014) Japanese educator

Source: Spiritual Journey: Michio Kushi's Guide to Endless Self-Realization and Freedom (1994, with Edward Esko), p. 54

J.M. Coetzee photo
Gloria Estefan photo
African Spir photo

“There is only one thing in the world that is really valuable, it is to do good.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 56.

John Galsworthy photo
Georges Bataille photo
George Harrison photo

“I look at the world and I notice it’s turning.
While my guitar gently weeps.
With every mistake we must surely be learning,
Still my guitar gently weeps.”

George Harrison (1943–2001) British musician, former member of the Beatles

While My Guitar Gently Weeps (1968)
Lyrics

Condoleezza Rice photo
T. E. Lawrence photo
Warren Buffett photo
Arundhati Roy photo
Jackson Pollock photo
Dennis Kucinich photo

“If we ask what it is he [ George Orwell] stands for, … the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have. … He communicates to us the sense that what he has done any one of us could do. Or could do if we but made up our mind to do it, if we but surrendered a little of the cant that comforts us, if for a few weeks we paid no attention to the little group with which we habitually exchange opinions, if we took our chance of being wrong or inadequate, if we looked at things simply and directly, having in mind only our intention of finding out what they really are, not the prestige of our great intellectual act of looking at them. He liberates us. He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us; he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our own lights—he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.”

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) American academic

“George Orwell and the politics of truth,” The Opposing Self (1950), pp. 156-158
The Opposing Self (1950)

Joe Biden photo
Sukarno photo
Saddam Hussein photo

“You Americans, you treat the Third World in the way an Iraqi peasant treats his new bride. Three days of honeymoon, and then it's off to the fields”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

Meeting with US State Department officials (1985), as quoted in The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Gulf War (2002) by Charles Jaco, p. 23.

Camille Paglia photo
Ray Bradbury photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Aron Ra photo

“… the fact is that while we have become the most religious of any of the predominantly Christian first world nations, (due to repeated surges in rural revivalism) the US in its infancy was once the most secular government in history. The original colonies were primarily peopled by refugees fleeing religious persecution in other countries. But almost upon arrival, the Puritans only continued that practice against native Shaman, then against Quakers, and even each other –over religious differences. Catholics to the South were even worse! The founding fathers however were largely Deists, the least devout form of theism. They were brilliant men who knew better than to let religion rule over law because theocracy has in all instances almost automatically violated human rights and it inevitably always does. Consequently, the irreligious and non-Christian framers of the American Constitution produced the first government ever to grant all its citizens the right to religious freedom, and they did so by forbidding the government from sponsoring or promoting one religion over any other. Because it is not possible to have freedom of religion without having freedom from religion.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"5th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzmbnxtnMB4, Youtube (January 14, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

“In its actual power today, the Chinese regime is still far behind the U. S., and there is no chance of its becoming a world hegemon any time soon.”

Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017) Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist

"Bellicose and Thuggish: The Roots of Chinese "Patriotism" at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century"
No Enemies, No Hate: Selected Essays and Poems

Gary Gygax photo

“I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else.”

Gary Gygax (1938–2008) American writer and game designer

GameSpy interview, Pt. 2 (16 August 2004)

Mahatma Gandhi photo

“We need to be the change we wish to see in the world.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

There is "no reliable documentary evidence for the quotation", according to an article in The New York Times. Brian Morton, "Falser Words Were Never Spoken" http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/falser-words-were-never-spoken.html?_r=0, New York Times, 2011-08-29. It is not found as a direct Gandhi quotation in the 98-volume authorized Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Misquotes that Bapu is forced to wear http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-10-03/ahmedabad/30238203_1_bapu-tushar-gandhi-gandhiji
The earliest evidence for quotes of this type comes from the "Love Project", an initiative begun at 1970 at a high school in Brooklyn, New York by teacher Arleen Lorrance. According to the project's website http://www.consciousnesswork.com/love.htm, "Be the change you want to see happen, instead of trying to change anyone else" was one the principles of the Project "received" by Lorrance in 1970 -- but contemporaneous evidence for this has not been found.
A 1972 newspaper article states: "Instead of advocating change in people and things, ... Love Project encourages people to actually be change itself". [San Antonio Express, 1972-09-28, 76, 'Love Project' Marks End of Quest, Ron, Fulkerson, https://www.newspapers.com/clip/12194386/love_project_1972/]
In 1974, Lorrance wrote, in a report on the Project: "One way to start a preventative program is to be the change you want to see happen." ( "The Love Project" https://books.google.com/books?id=NcTimfiMzYUC&pg=PA85&lpg=PA85&dq=arleen+lorrance+love+project+1972&source=bl&ots=X5fggiqrCZ&sig=JoOzC2X1QU1eePkOBoy-60rJ1RE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiAwIv-_a_MAhUBW2MKHYBQDFIQ6AEIQDAH#v=onepage&q=%22be%20the%20change%22&f=false, in Kellough (ed.), Developing Priorities and a Style, MSS, 1974).
In 1976, a newspaper report listed "'Be the change you want to see happen, instead of trying to change anyone else" as one of the principles of the Love Project. 'A Ministry Called "The Love Project", St Louis Post Dispatch, 1976-11-15, p. 36
In 1987, a similar quote was attributed to Gandhi in a New Mexico newspaper: "You must be the change you wish to see in the world". Hollis Engley, "A Long List of Varied Accomplishments" https://www.newspapers.com/clip/5211946/a_long_list_of_varied_accomplishments/, The New Mexican, Santa Fe, NM, 1987-01-11, p. D-1
In 1991,"We must be the change we wish to see in the world" is attributed to Gandhi in Stella Cornelius, "Partners in Conflict Resolution", from Barnaby (ed.), Building a More Democratic United Nations (1991) Google Book link https://books.google.com/books?id=rcYYoLsFNmAC&pg=PA70&dq=%22be+the+change%22+%22wish+to+see%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMI4ufD3tSLyQIVFFJjCh1muQX6#v=onepage&q=%22be%20the%20change%22%20%22wish%20to%20see%22&f=false
Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, has attributed the quote to his famous grandfather since at least 2000 https://web.archive.org/web/20000823060048/http://www.jca.apc.org/g21/panelists.htm. See also "Arun Gandhi Shares the Mahatma's Message" by Michel W. Potts, in India - West [San Leandro, California] Vol. XXVII, No. 13 (1 February 2002) p. A34, and "Be the change you wish to see: An interview with Arun Gandhi" by Carmella B'Hahn, Reclaiming Children and Youth [Bloomington] Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring 2001) p. 6.< It is not clear whether Arun claims to have directly witnessed his grandfather saying it, or whether he heard of it second-hand.
Misattributed