Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
Jonathan SacksRead
Stabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need to balance material and spiritual values in society.
Jonathan Sacks highlights the importance of not only stabilizing economic systems like the euro but also addressing the deeper cultural issues that prioritize materialism over human dignity and spiritual values. He calls for a return to the Judeo-Christian ethic, which promotes a recognition of human dignity rooted in the concept of being made in the image of God, suggesting that a society's true stability lies in its spiritual and ethical foundations rather than solely in its economic prosperity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about cultural values in economic crises.
Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
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Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.
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The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet.
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For nothing, how little soever, that is suffered for God's sake, can pass without merit in the sight of God.
The fundamental issue is the moral issue.
With a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and with a fraud I try to be a fraud and a half.
The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge.
Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.
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