Quotes About Impact

The quality of our lives depends, to a large degree, on the results of our decisions

her anger a third presence in the room

Christians are not particularly gifted at knowing how we sound to others, especially in parts of the world where our voices are the loudest and most numerous.

In a single sentence, Gandhi has given me a new way to live with the verse at the end of Matthew's Gospel, which Christians sometimes call the Great Commission. The way to make a disciple is to be one. If your life does not speak, your footnotes will have limited impact. Become worthy of the message, and join the spinning brigade. Why isn't that the Great Commission?

When the compressor for the air conditioning in the house turns on, I feel apologetic. I had no idea how loud it was out here, clearly interrupting a whole valley full of creatures that are trying to say something to one another.

The basic principle is to do no harm. Beyond that, you are free to do quite a lot of things for a living, but they are not all going to come with their own evident purposes. Supplying that purpose is going to be up to you.

For what remains veiled in one era comes back, as a ghost, to haunt us in another.

The beauty of empowering others is that your own power is not diminished in the process.

If kids come to us from strong, healthy functioning families, it makes our job easier. If they do not come to us from strong, healthy, functioning families, it makes our job more important.

Deviation," I repeated, thinking, There it is, so fast, the unsettled something. "It's a little more than that, Dad. We've actually been able to help someone. You know how good that feels. You do it in your work all the time, but James and I don't.

If I don't read page ninety, it won't have happened to them. Black Beauty will still live with all his friends at Birtwick Park … The knights will be able to go on having jolly adventures without Lancelot meeting Guinevere and bringing the whole Round Table crashing down into ruin on their heads…

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work — that goes on, it adds up.

There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.

It's what you do that makes your soul.

Sometimes the trail you leave behind you is more important than the path ahead of you.

come of it?

Maybe not. But maybe that's how the world changes, Isaiah. One father, one child, at a time.

Tuchman's Law: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to- tenfold." Barbara Tuchman Foreward to A Distant Mirror Published 1978

When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.

The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold.

I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended.

Although the mortality rate was erratic, ranging from one fifth in some places to nine tenths or almost total elimination in others, the overall estimate of modern demographers has settled—for the area extending from India to Iceland—around the same figure expressed in Froissart's casual words: "a third of the world died.

There was an aura about 1914 that caused those who sensed it to shiver for mankind. Tears came even to the most bold and resolute.

THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK was a desire to find out what were the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history—that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348–50, which killed an estimated one third of the population living between India and Iceland.