Excellence is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice. We do not act ‘rightly’ because we are ‘excellent’, in fact we achieve ‘excellence’ by acting ‘rightly’.
The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
- Topic: Leadership, Society
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
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Keep in mind that the true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.
The purpose of Propaganda is to make one set of people forget that other sets of people are human.
Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.
I had long since taught myself to follow the inner voice. I delighted in submitting to it. To act against it would be difficult and painful to me.
I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.
The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.
The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
False leaders create followers by lying.
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
When civil fury first grew high, and men fell out they knew not why.
In this age, the man who dares to think for himself and to act independently does a service to his race.
There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.
Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.
We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.
It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.
The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks.
The higher you soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.