Daisaku Ikeda Quotes

Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe.

Since the war [WWII], the world has been rushing forward at an unprecedented and exhilarating speed … Yet Britain lags behind, lacking the will or the plan which can bring this future within the reach of us all.

Society is changing constantly, and changing faster than we think.

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

For many societies, the journey to modernity has been painful and costly.

The modern world is one wherein every nation has to develop the strength of which its citizens are capable. The independent status of the individual, his thoughts and actions become a thing of the past.

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

Education, particularly higher education, will take Africa into the mainstream of globalization.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

Where humanity is going to find itself in, say, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years would be very difficult to predict, I think. There are moments, of course, when you think that it's going from bad to worse, but there are other moments when you think that human efforts are really flowering into something really fantastic.

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.

We live in a very different world than the one that we inherited from our parents and from our grandparents. Times are changing, and states must adapt to win.

The typical journalist's typical lead for the typical Canadian story nowadays is along this line: that Canadians are hard at work trying to gain a reputation as a nation of rapid social change.

Countries are not like financial markets. Social change cannot be executed as swiftly as credit-default swaps. You cannot sell short on social commitments and practical responsibilities.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

The world is very different today than it was in 1968.

We are redefining and we are restating our socialism in terms of the scientific revolution.

And I do believe that the way to change a society, to uplift people - not just their spirit, but to uplift their society and economic base - is through education.

Over the past thirty years Europe’s influence has transformed Cairo. Now…we are civilized.

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draw all, even the most barbarian of nations into civilization.

India, China, and Latin America have a tremendous stake in the people's century. As their masses learn to read and write, and as they become productive mechanics, their standard of living will double and treble.

Edinburgh, Scotland went from a narrow, theocratic, awful society to the intellectuality and free thinking Great Enlightenment in only 100 years.

Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which have tended to eliminate distance between peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another.

… modern civilization … enables us to cure sickness on a huge scale and to destroy each other on a huge scale. It enables us to liberate each other on a huge scale and to tyrannize each other on a huge scale…. There is no evidence of any continuous upward line of social progress