K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India
Source: "Speech By Shri Kocheril Raman Narayanan On His Assumption Of Office As President Of India"
New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)
Context: The recent period — and in particular the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution — has shown the enormous human, moral and spiritual potential, and the civic culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is unwise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake the totalitarian yoke from their shoulders in several weeks, and in a decent and peaceful way.
K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India
Source: "Speech By Shri Kocheril Raman Narayanan On His Assumption Of Office As President Of India"
Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist
Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 12 : The West, Civilizations, and Civilization, § 2 : The Commonalities Of Civilization, p. 319
Context: Does the vacuousness of Western universalism and the reality of global cultural diversity lead inevitably and irrevocably to moral and cultural relativism? If universalism legitimates imperialism, does relativism legitimate repression? Once again, the answer to these questions is yes and no. Cultures are relative; morality is absolute. Cultures, as Michael Walzer has argued, are “thick”; they prescribe institutions and behavior patterns to guide humans in the paths which are right in a particular society. Above, beyond, and growing out of this maximalist morality, however, is a “thin” minimalist morality that embodies “reiterated features of particular thick or maximal moralities.” Minimal moral concepts of truth and justice are found in all thick moralities and cannot be divorced from them. There are also minimal moral “negative injunctions, most likely, rules against murder, deceit, torture, oppression, and tyranny.” What people have in common is “more the sense of a common enemy [or evil] than the commitment to a common culture.” Human society is “universal because it is human, particular because it is a society.” At times we march with others; mostly we march alone. Yet a “thin” minimal morality does derive from the common human condition, and “universal dispositions” are found in all cultures. Instead of promoting the supposedly universal features of one civilization, the requisites for cultural coexistence demand a search for what is common to most civilizations. In a multicivilizational world, the constructive course is to renounce universalism, accept diversity, and seek commonalities.
Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)
Conference of the International Association of Police Chiefs http://www.mcjackie.com/cobb.html (24 September 1974). <br class="br">1970s
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)
Alfred Rosenberg book The Myth of the Twentieth Century
Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts ("The Myth of the Twentieth Century") - 1930 (in front of the actual text, not by Rosenberg himself)
Misattributed
“I would like to go to Paris for a week. Fifty-six Cezannes are being shown there!”
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist
In a letter to her mother, End of October 1907; as quoted in: Expressionism, a German intuition, 1905-1920, Neugroschel, Joachim; Vogt, Paul; Keller, Horst; Urban, Martin; Dube, Wolf Dieter; (transl. Joachim Neugroschel); publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1980, p. 30
1906 + 1907
Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Nobel Address (1991)
Context: During the last six years we have discarded and destroyed much that stood in the way of a renewal and transformation of our society. But when society was given freedom it could not recognize itself, for it had lived too long, as it were, "beyond the looking glass". Contradictions and vices rose to the surface, and even blood has been shed, although we have been able to avoid a bloodbath. The logic of reform has clashed with the logic of rejection, and with the logic of impatience which breeds intolerance.
Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)
It is that unique self-definition which has given us an exceptional appeal, but it also imposes on us a special obligation, to take on those moral duties which, when assumed, seem invariably to be in our own best interests.
Presidency (1977–1981), Inaugural Address (1977)
James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)