Quotes About Impact

Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.

We'll never get them to notice us if we say ordinary things in an ordinary way.

Everything you do right now ripples outward and affects everyone. Your posture can shine your heart or transmit anxiety. Your breath can radiate love or muddy the room in depression. Your glance can awaken joy. Your words can inspire freedom. Your every act can open hearts and minds.

knowledge has the unique ability to take aim at a distant target and utterly transform it while having scarcely any effect on the space between.

Many times information was most effective when it wasn't used. The same was true of any other weapon.

I think the real heroic teachers are the ones who work with kids, like my mom and my sister do.

The impending teacher shortage is the most critical education issue we will face in the next decade.

Personal faith can be a powerful force for public good.

Just twenty-one years after Columbus's first landing in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had renamed Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people—those Columbus chose to call Indians—had been killed by violence, disease, and despair.

Elie Wiesel is right: the road to Auschwitz was being paved in the earliest days of Christendom. But another conclusion now is equally evident: on the way to Auschwitz the road's pathway led straight through the heart of the Indies and of North and South America.

Within no more than a handful of generations following their first encounters with Europeans, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere's native peoples had been exterminated.

Columbus says he decided to send "two men up-country" to see what they could see. "They traveled for three days," he wrote, "and found an infinite number of small villages and people without number, but nothing of importance."35 People without number—but nothing of importance. It would become a motto for the ages.

No sooner were the ships unloaded, however, than sickness broke out among the crews. It quickly spread among the natives, who had come to greet the ships with gifts of fish and fruits, "as if we had been their brothers," recalled one of the men on board.

Nothing that ever happens is so unimportant that it doesn't change things.

Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters."5

Who can say why some arrive and then depart forgotten while others fashion history?

The real rivals among your peers will be room-changers. Certain people, when they walk into a room, alter the atmosphere. Everybody else adjusts their posture, their willingness to listen, their ideas. This is not a full definition of leadership, only its most obvious symptom.

What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?

Pensée d'un philosophe polonais Il y a des gens formidables Qu'on rencontre au mauvais moment. Et il y a des gens qui sont formidables Parce qu'on les rencontre au bon moment.

Pourquoi sommes-nous autant marqués par un détail, un geste, qui font de ces instants minimes le coeur d'une époque?

Se alejó, visiblemente en el mismo estado que aquel día de abril de 1992 en que vio una obra de Samuel Beckett en un teatro alternativo

Decisions, by all accounts, including those of the participants, were made with little knowledge of, or concern for, the lands and peoples about which and whom the decisions were being made.

The first decade of the twenty-first century was a crazy bookend to the twentieth, opening with a second Pearl Harbor and ending with a second Great Crash, with a second Vietnam wedged in between. Now we seem caught in the coils of a second Great Depression.

Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their operations.