change is not only possible but inevitable—Being connected means we change one another,,, We can direct that change in positive, productive ways.

Every man is a consumer but should be a producer.

Great works of art teach us to have confidence in our spontaneous impressions with good humored inflexibility—the most when the whole cry of voices is against us.

Trade embodies the principle of liberty. Trade planted America and destroyed Feudalism; it makes peace, keeps peace, and will destroy slavery. It destroyed the old aristocracy and created a new one but this one is based on merit instead of entitlement and is continually falling like the waves of the sea.

America is the fact, the symbol and the promise of a new beginning. And in human life, this possibility is among the most sacred aspects of existence.

What is most necessary for people and what is given us in great abundance, are experiences, especially experiences of the forces within us. This is our most essential food, our most essential wealth. If we consciously receive all this abundance, the universe will pour into us what is called life in Judaism, spirit in Christianity, light in Islam, power in Taoism.

The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and outer world... Materialism is a disease of the mind starved for ideas.

The new poverty in our country is time poverty. We need to recognize what’s missing from our lives and then make time for them. We need to live in the present, and try to experience a freedom from time.

Great ideas, ideas that meaningfully reflect something of the world's ancient tradition of wisdom, have the power to bind people together and to bring unity under a goal and a vision that are stronger and deeper than all personal, short-term gain.

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln... we regard them as heroes because they also lived and acted in relation to something that transcends and transforms the human condition. Each had his weaknesses, his defects, his doubts; but in each of them [there was] another greater force... they were heroes in the ancient sense of the term.

Ideas communicated through myth show us a world that is perceived through the vision of wonder, love of truth, and the sense of the sacred, the impulse to serve and to participate in a greater reality... cosmic and spiritual ides expressed in a way that touches the deeper springs of the mind

Our capacity to avert our awareness from the moral and metaphysical contradictions of our own nature—moral autohypnosis, the sleep of conscience, the sorrowful capacity of fallen man to hide from our profound betrayal of the good—is a fact that cannot be seen and studied without a serious commitment to truth

stepping into the future of the new America, we may discover in ourselves and of the old Earth, which is yearning for all of us to become genuine men and women of the soul.

'Love thy neighbor as thyself' surely does not mean that as we are, with all that is in us of fear and hate, we can transmit the divine power of love to our fellowman.

the illusion was embraced that man's life can be morally and materially perfected mainly through external changes involving, among other things, external forms of government and social order. This illusion was our illusion, and some time ago it became the whole world's illusion.

Communism placed its entire emphasis on improving the external lot of mankind. It placed its faith in external change, in the redistribution of wealth and the means of production, in the correcting of hierarchical inequities.

Give all of mankind an equal share of material goods today, and tomorrow there will exist the old inequities.

When the mind and heart are undeveloped or corrupt, no laws or economic system, however wisely conceived, can bring about the Good... Without this inner aim, economics turns us into consumers, rather than creators.

Fervid nationalism or a patriotism that is only a mask for insecurity and ignorance is, of course, the opposite of belief in the inner meaning

Whitman proposes something deeper: he proposes the work of understanding; and, in preparation for understanding, the work of feeling the present need and the future obligation.