Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

We are the most powerful nation in the world, but we're not the only nation in the world. We are not the only people in the world. We are an important people, the wealthiest, the most powerful and, to a great extent, generous. But we are part of the world.

Nowhere on this planet today is there an impregnable fortress, a continent or island so distant that it can ignore all the outer world.

We can't afford to live in isolation, and we need to teach our kids that the things that they do not only matter to others far away but impact others who live far away, and there are ripples of effect.

What happened to us in September, 2001, is a microcosmic but painful and powerful example of the fact we live in an inter-dependent world that is not yet an integrated global community.

People are beginning to understand there is nothing in the world so remote that it can't impact you as a person. It's not just diseases. Economists are now beginning to say if we are going to have good markets in Africa, we're going to have to have healthy people in Africa.

Today the fate of humankind is even more crucially linked than ever before. The boundaries between the problems of 'others' and 'our' problems are being increasingly erased.

Neighbor is no longer confined to the vocabulary of the individual. It is a national word. Modern inventions have annihilated distance. Commercial relations have broken down barriers of race and religion, and the family of nations is a recognized fact.

The world before 1914 was already a world in which the welfare of each individual nation was inextricably bound up with the prosperity of the whole community of nations.

The Internet is emblematic of an era in which what happens in Southeast Asia or southern Africa - from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against aids - can affect Americans. As has been observed about water pollution, we all live downstream now.

The world is far more interconnected today. Hence the need to understand each other is greater than ever before.

I have long believed this interdependence defines the new world we live in.

As we realize that more and more things have global impact, I think we're going to get people increasingly wanting to get away from a purely national interest.

We live in a globalising world. That means that all of us, consciously or not, depend on each other. Whatever we do or refrain from doing affects the lives of people who live in places we'll never visit.

Sovereignty will fall victim to the flow of people, ideas, greenhouse gases, dollars, drugs, viruses, and e-mails… Sovereign states will increasingly measure their vulnerability not to one another but to forces of globalization beyond their control.

We live in an interdependent world. We depend on one another for prosperity.

Every day I walk down the street or hop on the subway, I am reminded that I am a citizen of a very big, incredibly diverse world.

Everything has changed and we're all living in one city now. What happens somewhere affects things everywhere, so I have to be careful and whatever stories I work on, I want them to have redeeming moral values.

We are challenged to develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one.

... Our individual well-being is intimately connected both with that of all others and with the environment within which we live.... Our every action, our every deed, word, and thought, no matter how slight or inconsequential it may seem, has an implication not only for ourselves, but for all others, too.

Not everybody gets to travel halfway around the world to see a whole different perspective. If we can see that on TV, we'll know that society is bigger than the small world we all live in.

We in Europe must not indulge the illusion that we could shut ourselves away from the world if it goes to pieces, and maybe offer a bit of humanitarian aid.

Humans have to realise they're not individuals but individual parts of the same organism, with responsibility to each other.

How we live our lives in the Western world has impacts on the rest of the world.

I don't know why I developed a social consciousness, but I really think I have a consciousness; I feel connected to everything and everybody in the world.

As our world gets more interconnected, no one country or region can meet development challenges on its own.