Literacy unlocks the door to learning throughout life, is essential to development and health, and opens the way for democratic participation and active citizenship.
Development should be a mass movement. We need to integrate the people and make it a mass movement.
By focusing on the community, you can learn more about the whole country.
Never be seduced into believing it isn't the role of business to tackle the big issues, because it absolutely is.
Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body.
At some point in your life you have to engage with the fact that you are part of a society. Yeah the individual is the most important facet in society but unless every individual is the recipient of free health care, free education decent affordable housing and a proper pension then only the rich and powerful will be individuals and the rest of us will be exploited by them.
I like people too much or not at all.
I moved to Philadelphia to go to school at Eastern partly because I wanted to study the Bible and I also went to study sociology. I like how Karl Barth said we have to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other so that our faith doesn't just become a ticket into heaven and a license to ignore the world around us.
Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.
Tocqueville talked about "ceaseless agitation," citizens constantly use their institutions, constantly challenging them, constantly insisting upon their rights. It's also individuals taking responsibility for other individuals, recognition that no democracy works if they're weaklings.
People are motivated to vote early, to defend core American values.
You cannot wash the feet of a dirty world if you refuse to touch it
All through the nineties I met people. Crowds of people. Met and met and met, until it seemed that people were born and hastily grew up, just to be met.
Our constitutional democracy demands our participation, all the time.
Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company. By that Means, every Thing of what we call Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir'd by Conversation.
If there is no freedom of expression, then the beauty of life is lost. Participation in a society is not an artistic choice, it’s a human need.
I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.
When artists and philosophers talk only amongst themselves, they ignore the potential of popular culture to become a variety of dialogues with and between everyday people. Its discourse may be productive of desire and pleasure, but popular culture is also a language in which people discuss politics, religion, ethics, and action.
What, then is our duty? It is to carefully distinguish the historic moment in which we live and to consciously assign our small energies to a specific battlefield. The more we are in phase with the current which leads the way, the more we aid man in his difficult, uncertain, danger-fraught ascent toward salvation.
I went to Seattle as just another geek in the food chain, thinking, "Well, in my own puny little way, I'd rather be a part of history than just sit and watch it on TV." So, the fact that so many people are starting to ask the right questions and rack their brains for solutions does give me hope.
All journalists hope that their work will inspire a broader conversation. I think that's just what journalism is.
Quit Babylon for love of the Babylonians.And do not seek ease or security you can obtain by using Babylon. What will it avail you to cease living in Babylon if you do not also cease living on Babylon?
I think the nation as a whole has a role in making sure that each individual, each citizen maximizes one's potential.
Leadership from the Oval Office - and sustained, effective use of the bully pulpit - is essential to getting the American people off their too-pampered butts and into meeting successfully the long-haul challenges of fixing major problems in the very fabric of our republic's life, both domestically and in our international relations.
If you want democracy, you have got to be prepared to accept the responsibilities of democracy. The people have to take part. They have to understand that they have the power to move things, and they must really commit themselves to change if they want it.
