Quotes About People

If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.

I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help we diminish ourselves.

We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

We are a people of improbable hope.

trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people

Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power. Issues

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West – know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.

You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn't new, that wasn't black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead—a faith in other people.

wish I had your optimism. Sometimes I do. But people can be so selfish and just plain ignorant. I think a lot of people don't want to be bothered. And I think politics seems like it's full of people willing to do anything for power, who just think about themselves.

A change happens because ordinary people do extraordinary things.

Just talk. Yet what concerned me wasn't the damage loose talk caused efforts...,or the emotional pain it caused others. It was the distance between our talk and our action, the effect it was having on us as individuals and as a people.

people were moved by emotion, not facts.

There was poetry as well – a luminous world always present beneath the surface, a world that people might offer up as a gift to me, if I only remembered to ask

practical people who knew life was too hard to judge each other's choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals

proof of people's capacity to harness ingenuity in the service of madness.

he insisted that I move toward the center of people's lives

the will to conquer other people's minds or territories or aspirations…is meaningless.

You've been cursed with people's high expectations, he said, shaking my hand. Because it means they are also easily disappointed. It's something I'm familiar with. I fear it can be a trap. p351

Il n'y a aucune raison que la politique soit nécessairement conforme à l'image que s'en font les gens. Ca peut être autre chose.

What I noticed at Grace-Calvary is the same thing I notice whenever people aim to solve their conflicts with one another by turning to the Bible: defending the dried ink marks on the page becomes more vital than defending the neighbor. As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, 'People of the Book risk putting the book above people.

The advice that you must change your environment—for example, by eliminating negative people and news—is an admission that there may in fact be a "real world" out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only "positive" response is to withdraw into one's own carefully constructed world of constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people.

The advice that you must change your environment—for example, by eliminating negative people and news—is an admission that there may in fact be a "real world" out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes.

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

You can't replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you're not going to run out of people to love.