Perspectives....

"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the suffering of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty, too, will end, and that peace and tranquility will reign again." 

-- Anne Frank 

"When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit. Which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance. We've learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven't learned to walk the earth as brothers and sisters."

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity."

-- John F. Kennedy

"All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore as a free man, I take pride in the words: Ich bin ein Berliner." (Speech at West Berlin City Hall, June 26, 1963)

-- John F. Kennedy

"The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"Too much and for too long we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product now is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that gross national product, if we judge the United States of America by that, that gross national product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall. It counts napalm, and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifles and Speck's knives and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America, except why we are proud that we are Americans."

--Robert F. Kennedy

"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

-- Abraham Lincoln

"…heroes are ordinary men and women who dare to see and meet the call of a possibility greater than themselves. People who, despite their doubts and fears, commit themselves to action. People who go beyond their limits in what they think is possible.

--Joan Holmes (Hunger Project)

 " I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend your right to say it, with my life."

--Voltaire

"Love it or leave it"

--Anonymous

  "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

--Edmund Burke, British statesman and philosopher

" God helps those who help themselves"

--Benjamin Franklin