Harvard University Alumni

"The West believes that man and the universe are both complex and that the apparently discordant parts of each can be put into a reasonably workable arrangement with a little good will, patience, and experimentation."

"For years I have told my students that I been trying to train executives rather than clerks. The distinction between the two is parallel to the distinction previously made between understanding and knowledge. It is a mighty low executive who cannot hire several people with command of more knowledge than he has himself."

"To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective."

"In fact, violence as a symbol of our growing irrationality has had an increasing role in activity for its own sake, when no possible justification could be made that the activity was seeking to resolve a problem."

"One of the chief reasons for the widespread fear of the Huns rested on their ability to travel very long distances in relatively short periods. This ability may well have been based on their use of horseshoes."

"When these extremists argued for "either-or," the Western tradition answered "both!""

"The fundamentalist position on biblical interpretation, with its emphasis on the explicit, complete, final, and authoritarian nature of Scripture, is a very late, minority view quite out of step with the Western tradition."

"Western ideology believed that the world was good because it was made by God in six days and that at the end of each day He looked at His work and said that it was good."

"No culture has ever exceeded Western civilization in power and extent. Our society now covers more than half of the globe, extending in space from Poland to the east of Australia i n the west. In the course of this expansion, most of it during the last five centuries, the power of Western civilization has been so great that it has destroyed, almost without thinking of it, hundreds of other societies, including five or six other civilizations."

"Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change."

"No slave system has ever been able to continue to function on the slaves provided by its own biological reproduction because the rate of human reproduction is too slow and the expense from infant mortality and years of unproductive upkeep of the young make this prohibitively expensive. This relationship is one of the basic causes of the American Civil War, and was even more significant in destroying ancient Rome."

"The instrument of expansion of Classical civilization was a social organization, slavery."

"The process by which civilization, as an abstract entity distinct from the societies in which it is embodied, dies or is reborn is a very significant one."

"When profits are pursued by geographic interchange of goods, so that commerce for profit becomes the central mechanism of the system, we usually call it "commercial capitalism." In such a system goods are conveyed from ares where they are more common (and therefore cheaper) to areas where they are less common (and therefore less cheap). This process leads to regional specialization and to division of labor, both in agricultural production and in handicrafts."

"Capitalism might be defined, if we wish to be scientific, as a form of economic organization motivated by the pursuit of profit within a price structure."

"This priesthood became a closed group, able to control enormous wealth and incomes, and concerned very largely with the study of the solar and astronomical periodicities on which there influence was originally based. With the surplus thus created, the priesthood was able to command human labor in huge amounts and to direct this labor from the simple tillage of the peasant peoples to the diversified and specialized activities that constitute civilized living."

"It is also in theory, conceivable that some universal empire some day might cover the whole globe, leaving no external "barbarians" to serve as invaders."

"The vested interests encourage the growth of imperialist wars and irrationality because both serve to divert the discontent of the masses away from their vested interests ( the uninvested surplus)."

"These seven stages we shall name as follows: 1. Mixture 2. Gestation 3. Expansion 4. Age of Conflict 5. Universal Empire 6. Decay 7. Invasion"

"Every civilization must be organized in such a way that it has invention, capital accumulation, and investment."

"It is clear that every civilization undergoes a process of historical change. We can see that a civilization comes into existence, passes through a long experience, and eventually goes out of existence."

"Our political organization, based as it is on an eighteenth-century separation of powers and on a nineteenth-century nationalist state, is generally recognized to be semiobselete."

"The backwardness of our religious and social developments is undoubtedly holding back the development of the intellectual and political levels."

"When we approach history, we are dealing with a conglomeration of irrational continua. Those who deal with history by nonrational processes are the ones who make history, the actors in it."

"A civilization is complicated, in the first place, because it is dynamic; that is, it is constantly changing in the passage of time, until it has perished."

"A society is a group whose members have more relationships with one another then they do with outsiders."

"The social sciences are usually concerned with groups of persons rather than individual persons. The behavior of individuals, being free, is unpredictable."

"A fully integrated culture would be like the dinosaurs, which had to perish because they were no longer able to adapt themselves to changes in the external environment."

"Each individual in a society is a nexus where innumerable relationships of this character intersect."

"The range of human potentialities is also the range of human needs because of man's vital drive that impels him to seek to realize his potentialities. this drive is even more mysterious than the potentialities it seeks to realize."

"Closely related to the erroneous idea that science is a body of knowledge is the equally erroneous idea that scientific theories are true."

"Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else."

"It is not easy to tear any event out of the context of the universe in which it occurred without detaching from it some factor that influenced it."

"After years of work in both areas of study, I concluded that the social sciences were different, in many important ways, from the natural sciences, but that the same scientific methods were applicable in both areas, and, indeed, that no very useful work could be done in either area except by scientific methods."

"I came into history from a primary concern with mathematics and science. This has been a tremendous help to me as a person and as a historian, although it must be admitted it has served to make my historical interpretations less conventional than may be acceptable of many of my colleagues in the field."

"This book is not a history. Rather it is an attempt to establish analytical tools that will assist the understanding of history"

"No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything."

"Over the past 29 years, Rwandans have demonstrated strong resilience in overcoming the greatest tragedies and, in the process, have inspired the rest of the world."

"As a country with similar experiences and foundations, Korea will work side-by-side with Rwanda and the world toward a better future by achieving what Kwibuka teaches us."

"When we stand together, there is no limit to what we can achieve. Three days ago, young people from many nations stood together in the balcony of this Hall. They asked for one thing above all: change. There is nothing we can say to the world’s children that can convince them the world needs to be the way it is. That means we must do everything we can to close the gap between the world as it is, and the world as it should be. That is the mission of the United Nations."

"[Conchita Wurst] She is an incredible singer and entertainer. But what made her win so meaningful was the way she turned her victory in the Song Contest into an electrifying moment of human rights education. Conchita is promoting respect for diversity. This is a core value of the United Nations Charter, along with our commitment to tolerance. She confounds people's preconceived ideas of gender and sexuality - and she appeals to them to accept her as she is. That is a powerful message. I am delighted she is using her talent and the Eurovision platform to take this message to a global audience."

"Our world is one of terrible contradictions. Plenty of food but one billion people go hungry. Lavish lifestyles for a few, but poverty for too many others. Huge advances in medicine while mothers die everyday in childbirth . . . Billions spent on weapons to kill people instead of keeping them safe."

"Global Classrooms are a cinch, with the help of Merrill Lynch. When you put the org in Google, partnerships go truly gloooobal. There is hope for Earth's salvation, with the Cisneros Foundation. With Jay-Z there's double strife, life for children and water for life. Human health will get ahead, with the valiant work of (RED). For the poor and doing good, stays the job of Robin Hood. UN stays on the front burner, thanks to our champ Ted Turner. And whole revolutions stem, from the work of UNIFEM. But tonight my special shout-out, goes to one I can't do without. We have traveled up and down, Frisco, Atlanta, Chicago town. Yes, the king of all the doers, is my trusty friend Bill Luers."

"Malala is a brave and gentle advocate of peace who through the simple act of going to school became a global teacher. She said one pen can change the world - and proved how one young woman can lead the way."

"Two years into his term as the world's most prominent diplomat, Ban Ki-moon had yet to make much of an impression on the global stage. Some of this was just the nature of the job: Although the U.N. secretary-general presides over a budget of many billions of dollars, a sprawling bureaucracy, and a host of international agencies, his or her power is largely derivative, dependent on an ability to herd 193 countries toward something resembling a common direction. Ban's relatively low profile was also the result of his understated, methodical style-a paint-by-numbers approach to diplomacy that had undoubtedly served him well during his thirty-seven-year career in his native South Korea's foreign service and diplomatic corps but that stood in sharp contrast to the urbane charisma of his predecessor at the U.N., Kofi Annan. You didn't go into a meeting with Ban expecting to hear captivating stories, witty asides, or dazzling insights. He didn't ask how your family was doing or share details of his own life outside the job. Instead, after a vigorous handshake and repeated thank-yous for seeing him, Ban would dive headlong into a stream of talking points and factoids, delivered in fluent but heavily accented English and the earnest, formulaic jargon of a U.N. communiqué. Despite his lack of pizzazz, I would come to like and respect Ban. He was honest, straightforward, and irrepressibly positive, someone who on several occasions stood up to pressure from member states in pursuit of much-needed U.N. reforms and who instinctively came down on the right side of issues even if he didn't always have the capacity to move others to do the same. Ban was also persistent-especially on the topic of climate change, which he had designated as one of his top priorities."

"On December 12, 2015, official delegates and observers gathered in the plenary hall of COP21. It was there that the Paris Agreement was announced. The end result of decades of work, world leaders hailed it as a great success. "The Paris Agreement is a monumental triumph for people and our planet," UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon tweeted immediately after the closing gavel fell. Many environmental groups praised the outcome as well…Not everyone agreed."

"On the global-warming front, the opening of the U.N. General Assembly this week coincided with a major meeting on climate change, attended by more than 80 world leaders. As U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon kicked off the meeting, he said: “We hold the future in our hands. Together we must ensure that our grandchildren will not have to ask why we have failed to do the right things and left them to suffer the consequences. So let us send a clear and collective signal to people everywhere. Today, let the world know that you are ready to shoulder this responsibility and that you will address this challenge head-on.”"

"Because I can understand the English language. It is my mother tongue."

"When people fear surveillance, whether it exists or not, they grow afraid to speak their minds and hearts freely to their government or to anyone else."

"We have the power to chose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world."