Peter Matthiessen Quotes

To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think.

I've said goodbye to the overworked notion that architecture has to save the world.

My object is to save the world, while still leading a pleasant life.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

But if I could do anything? Maybe you would want to be able to save the world, the Voice said. Did you ever think of that? No. I frowned. Leave that to the grown-ups. But grown-ups are the ones destroying the world, the Voice said. Think about it.

Leave it to a naive world-saver like you to view our love as a Sacred Cause when in actual fact all it was was some barking at the moon.

Harry Dresden. Saving the world, one act of random destruction at a time.

If we want to save the world, we must have a plan. But no plan will work unless we meditate.

He never stopped wanting to save the world.

I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things.

It's impossible for anyone to meet the expectation of being the savior of the world.

An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else

I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it's gone, it's like there's nothing left of you at all . . . except what you can't be rid of.

We find ourselves in that situation where we want to believe, we want to think we're the exception, we want to think we can change someone or tame a lion or make a bad guy good or something like that but 9 times out of 10 we end up looking back going, "Oh, shame on me, should've seen that one coming!"

In the beginning there was faith - which is childish; trust - which is vain; and illusion - which is dangerous.

The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.

So you drive as far as you can, even when you can clearly read the sign. You want to think you are exempt, that it doesn’t apply to you. But it does. Life is still a dead end. And we still have a hard time believing it

I think [John Adams] developed a much deeper suspicion of France and the other European powers than he had earlier. He lost much if not all of the utopian thinking about international politics and diplomacy expressed in his Model Treaty of 1776 and became much more cynical about the world.

With a little luck that epoch may arrive. I am on the side of those who think that things will go better when the world has changed.

I think the Internet has changed the world.

I think you can't deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking.

I don't think I'm craving any more fame. But success and being recognized for making great work all around the world, I think it's a great thing.

Fundamentally, as human beings, we're very, very alike and a lot more alike than we think, but we have a tendency to divide the world into them and us. In prison, when people commit a crime and we put them away, they definitely become "them." We don't want to deal with it because they have chosen to step out of society, so we're going to keep them out. Even if they serve their time, we're going to make sure that, for the rest of their lives, they're going to be branded. I don't know how to do it in a different way, but I think it clearly doesn't work.

Souls are dangerous things to carry straight through all the spilt saltpetre of this world.

We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.