The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations.
It was more than love at first sight. For Mallory it was as if a dam had burst and the impounded emotions of a young lifetime had found immediate release.
What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you are.
In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.
She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience.
The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being YOU: they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.
There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,’ Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. ‘Severity always,’ went the British motto, ‘justice when possible.
Social mores, he argued, rules of protocol, concepts of rectitude and honor had no objective basis. They were only reflections of public and private fears.
All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history.
You know, once something freezes, it’s solid. That’s the key to the arctic – they didn’t fear the cold, they made use of it.