Paraphrased variant: We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
Harvard address (2008)
“It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too. It needs them now.”
This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and its Magic Rivers is a collection of essays and photographs edited by Wallace Stegner and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1955. This passage is from the collection's first essay, "The Marks of Human Passage", which is by Stegner (page 17).
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Wallace Stegner 29
American historian, writer, and environmentalist 1909–1993Related quotes
"What the World Needs Now is Love" (1965); this song was actually written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and offered to other singers who initially passed it up. It became DeShannon's first number one hit.
Misattributed
Japan's Nintendo wins exclusive deal for Capcom's Monster Hunter 3 title http://www.sharewatch.com/story.php?storynumber=49593
Interview with David Brancaccio (2003)
Context: We need to maintain law and order. We need to maintain peace in the world. We need to protect the environment. We need to have some degree of social justice, equality of opportunity. The markets are not designed to take care of those needs. That's a political process. And the market fundamentalists have managed to reduce providing those public goods.
1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)
1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)
Did Adam have a Bellybutton?: And other tough questions about the Bible (2000)
Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 6: "The Little Apocrypha", p. 72
Context: We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are seaching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us — that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence — then we don't like it any more.