Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.
Interpretation
Governments cannot create successful marriages or make irresponsible people responsible; real change requires a different approach.
This quote emphasizes that while governments can provide structures and regulations, they cannot directly influence the personal relationships or moral character of individuals. True transformation in relationships and personal responsibility requires inner change facilitated by different agents, such as community, family, or personal growth initiatives.
In practice
In a discussion about social issues, one might say, 'As Jonathan Sacks noted, governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens.'
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.
Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.
Find people not to envy but to admire. Do not the profitable but the admirable deed. Live by ideals.
Some years ago there was a study to discover the most stressful occupation. It turned out not to be the head of a large business, football manager or prime minister, but rather: bus driver.
The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet.
An individual poor person is an isolated island by himself and herself. IT can end that isolation overnight.
I do not remember very many things from the inside out. I do not remember what it felt like to touch things, or how bathwater traveled over my skin. I did not like to be touched, but it was a strange dislike. I did not like to be touched because I craved it too much. I wanted to be held very tight so I would not break. Even now, when people lean down to touch me, or hug me, or put a hand on my shoulder, I hold my breath. I turn my face. I want to cry.
The truth was, there were four partners in our marriage. Stephen and me, motor neurone disease, and physics. If you took out motor neurone disease, you are still left with physics.
Every human being, of whatever origin, of whatever station, deserves respect. We must each respect others even as we respect ourselves.
We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women - whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.
Plenty of the women who were single in the nineteenth century wrote about their desire to evade marriage. Marriage was scary in a lot of ways. It often involved having a lot of kids, losing your autonomy, being in service to a husband and children who were often born at an unremitting pace without the benefit of modern medicine.
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