But if future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than with sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as God really made it, not just as it looked when we got through with it.
Interpretation
We should strive to improve the world for future generations, not just through technology but also by preserving its natural beauty.
This quote emphasizes the responsibility of current generations to leave a positive legacy for the future. While technological advancements are important, it is equally essential to maintain and appreciate the natural world as it exists, ensuring that future generations inherit a planet that is not only advanced but also beautiful and thriving, reflecting the original creation rather than a degraded version of it.
In practice
In a speech about environmental policy, one might say, 'As Lyndon B. Johnson wisely noted, we must leave a glimpse of the world as God made it.'
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
Peace is a journey of a thousand miles and it must be taken one step at a time.
We do this in order to slow down aggression. We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South Vietnam who have bravely born this brutal battle for so many years with so many casualties. And we do this to convince the leaders of North Vietnam-and all who seek to share their conquest-of a simple fact: We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.
So far are we generally from thinking what we often say of the shortness of life, that at the time when it is necessarily shortest we form projects which we delay to execute, indulge such expectations as nothing but along train of events can gratify, and suffer those passions to gain upon us which are only excusable in the prime of life.
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
If government is to serve any purpose it is to do for others what they are unable to do for themselves.
Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.
That's a spiritual lifestyle, being willing to admit that you don't know everything and that you were wrong about some things. It's about making a list of all the people you've harmed, either emotionally or physically or financially, and going back and making amends. That's a spiritual lifestyle. It's not a fluffy ethereal concept.
When you look at it that way, you can see how absurd it is that we individualize ourselves with our fences and hoarded possessions.
Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.
The flexibility we gain in asana is the living symbol of the suppleness we gain in relation to life’s problems and challenges.
All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows.
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