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Global Village

  • Our physical unity has gone far ahead of our moral unity.

  • The gaps in power, the gaps in wealth, the gaps in ideology which hold the nations apart also make up the abyss into which mankind can fall to annihilation.

  • To act without rapacity, to use knowledge with wisdom, to respect interdependence, to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival.

    • Barbara Ward,
    • speech (1972), in Nigel Cross, Evidence for Hope ()
  • We have believed — and we do believe now — that freedom is indivisible, that peace is indivisible, that economic prosperity is indivisible.

  • ... in today's world no country can be absolutely independent of another. It is a world of interdependence.

  • Self-restraint may be alien to the human temperament, but humanity without restraint will dig its own grave.

  • Where Jack isn't safe, Tom's in danger.

  • Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

  • We all have to rise in the end, not just one or two who were smart enough, had will enough for their own salvation, but all the halt, the maimed and the blind of us which is most of us.

  • Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, nor absorbed.

  • The ignoring of differences is the most fatal mistake in politics or industry or international life: every difference that is swept up into a bigger conception feeds and enriches society; every difference which is ignored feeds on society and eventually corrupts it.

  • ... every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.

  • ... the tormented world cries out for internationhood, for co-existence in a harmony of diversity and mutual aid, for an end to self-segregation along secondary or superficial or downright imbecilic lines.

  • Our obligation to the world is, primarily, our obligation to our own future. Obviously, we cannot develop beyond a certain point unless other nations develop, too.

  • A respect for the rights of other peoples to determine their forms of government and their economy will not weaken our democracy. It will inevitably strengthen it.

  • What we apparently have failed to grasp is that, in this new world in which we live, the collective hunger of great masses of people, wherever they may be, will affect our long-range welfare, just as though they were our own people.

  • We cannot exist as a little island of well-being in a world where two-thirds of the people go to bed hungry every night.

  • [The United States] is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.

  • ... the friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests, which are always liable to deflection.

  • Is this something else our age does — on the one hand make communication easier than ever before, while on the other hand widening the gulf between those who are 'developed' and those who are not?

  • ... there can be neither politically nor morally a good which is not universal ... we cannot reform for a time or for a class, but for all and for the whole, and our very interests will draw us together in one wide bond of sympathy.

  • ... there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat it.

  • They were all too tightly bound together, men and women, creatures wild and tame, flowers, fruits and leaves, to ask that any one be spared. As long as the whole continued, the earth could go about its business.

  • On the contrary, I'm a universal patriot, if you could understand me rightly: my country is the world.

  • Every era of renaissance has come out of new freedoms for peoples. The coming renaissance will be greater than any in human history, for this time all the peoples of the earth will share in it.

  • Peace or harmony between the sexes and individuals does not necessarily depend on a superficial equalization of human beings; nor does it call for the elimination of individual traits and peculiarities. The problem that confronts us today, and which the nearest future is to solve, is how to be one's self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one's own characteristic qualities.

    • Emma Goldman,
    • "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation," Anarchism ()
  • The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

  • Blessed are the inclusive for they shall be included ... Cursed are the exclusive for they shall be excluded.

  • The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.

  • In much of the world the chief human right that people recognize is 800 calories a day.

  • Oppression does not know the meaning of provincial boundaries. Aren't our energies better spent fighting the common enemy instead of each other?

  • Our human situation no longer permits us to make armed dichotomies between those who are good and those who are evil, those who are right and those who are wrong. The first blow dealt to the enemy's children will sign the death warrant of our own.

  • ... the people of one nation alone cannot save their own children; each holds the responsibility for the others' children.

  • Faith and architectural principles erected our great temples and cathedrals; faith and the human sciences are needed to erect a social order in which the children of our enemies will be protected as surely as our own children, so that all will be safe.

  • So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the 'global village' we would propagate prejudice and ignorance. There was absolutely no harm in being part of a small group — indeed, with our hunter-gatherer band mentality it gave comfort, provided us with an inner circle of friends who could be utterly trusted, who were absolutely reliable. It helped give us peace of mind. The danger came only from drawing that sharp line, digging that ditch, laying that minefield, between our own group and any other group that thought differently.

    • Jane Goodall,
    • in Jane Goodall with Phillip Berman, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey ()
  • 'Another world is possible!' ... Another world is also necessary, for this one is unjust, unsustainable, and unsafe. It's up to us to envision, fight for, and create that world, a world of freedom, real justice, balance, and shared abundance, a world woven in a new design.

  • But only those who have aims and ambitions for the benefit, not of the individual, but of humankind as a whole can persevere to the end.

    • Ding Ling,
    • "Thoughts on March 8" (1942), in I Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling ()
  • When there is a world scarcity of any commodity, whether it's food or free speech, then the whole world must go on rations in order that eventually the whole world may have it again in plenty.

    • Jan Struther,
    • "Freedom of Speech," A Pocketful of Pebbles ()
  • ... until we have done everything we can to make the whole world into a home fit for all men, women and children to live in, we have not earned the right to enjoy our own fireside.

    • Jan Struther,
    • "Women's Part in Federal Union," A Pocketful of Pebbles ()
  • Physical weather certainly is beyond our control. ... But human weather — the psychological climate of the world — is not beyond our control. The human race is its own rain and its own sun. It creates its own cyclones and anti-cyclones. The ridges of high pressure which we sometimes enjoy, the troughs of low pressure which we so often endure, are of our own making and nobody else's.

    • Jan Struther,
    • "The Weather of the World," A Pocketful of Pebbles ()
  • ... whatever we do to any other thing in the great web of life, we do to ourselves, for we are one.

  • My ideal is that we all be economically interdependent. We should not be independent like millionaires, nor dependent like laborers. My ideal is that we all be interdependent.

    • Rose Pastor Stokes,
    • 1912, in Herbert Stokes and David L. Sterling, eds., "I Belong to the Working Class": The Unfinished Autobiography of Rose Pastor Stokes ()
  • Will we ever reach a point when it is no longer necessary to say Them and Us? I believe we must reach that point, or perish.

  • We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.

  • There is a choice before us as people who live in a great world, so knit together that even America cannot stand quite outside it, or act as though it were situated somewhere on the moon! That choice is a choice — let me put it quite brutally — between heaven and hell. ... But it is not a choice between a heaven or a hell beyond the grave; it is a choice between making heaven or making hell on this side of the grave, and in this world, here and now.

    • A. Maude Royden,
    • "The World at the Crossroads," Women at the World's Crossroads ()
  • The charity that begins at home cannot rest there but draws one inexorably over the threshold and off the porch and down the street and so out and out and out and out into the world which becomes the home wherein charity begins until it becomes possible, in theory at least, to love the whole of creation with the same patience, affection, and amusement one first practiced, in between the pouts and tantrums, with parents, siblings, spouse, and children.

  • The struggle to maintain peace is immeasurably more difficult than any military operation.

  • Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody.

  • I am a citizen of the world.

    • Sylvia Beach,
    • in Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation ()
  • Instead of thinking in international terms, as the changing pattern of world events demanded, we persisted in limiting our vision to national vistas. We lulled ourselves with the comfortable conviction that the future of our country would be decided according to developments in New York and Washington, without regard to anything that happened or could happen in Shanghai, Chungking, Moscow, or Berlin.

    • Vanya Oakes,
    • "Need for an International Outlook," White Man's Folly ()
  • ... I don't believe there's more than one human man or woman in a thousand who can think internationally, and until the majority can I don't see any hope of lasting peace.

  • The time has come to listen to the frightened moans of our fellow brothers and sisters and indeed the earth itself is in pain.

  • Autonomous people, nations, and systems can promote each other's welfare; they do not have to fight each other like those whose inner insecurity and immaturity continually demand the demarcation of limits and postures of intimidation.

  • When the United Nations was born it was believed to be a positive instrument for peace. From this exalted position it became an organization in which nations would at least keep talking instead of shooting. Soon it was discovered ... that words were as deadly as any weapon, and when these words had a number of interpretations they could and did lead to conflict.

  • The development of the national spirit in its present form leads into blind alleys. Some condition must be found which preserves the life of the nation, but rules out the fatal rivalry among nations.

    • Käthe Kollwitz,
    • letter (1917), in Hans Kollwitz, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz ()
  • The world is my country.

    • Alice Wheeldon,
    • letter (1917), in Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars ()
  • While we have more than we need on this continent, and others die for want of it, there can be no lasting peace. When we work as hard in peacetime to make this world decent to live in, as in wartime we work to kill, the world will be decent, and the causes for which men fight will be gone.

  • When my children were small, I had a refrigerator slogan that read: 'If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.' Perhaps that was my children's first lesson in systems thinking. We adults are learning this too. If others don't feel safe, we aren't safe. If others are struggling, we experience the consequence of their struggle. If others are poor, no matter how wealthy we are, we experience the consequences of their impoverishment.