Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
Interpretation
Intrinsic values drive us to improve the world around us.
This quote emphasizes the significance of intrinsic values, such as compassion, integrity, and justice, arguing that these ideals motivate individuals to strive for a better society. It suggests that when we recognize and embrace these values, they empower us to overcome challenges and inspire positive change in the world.
In practice
During a keynote speech at a conference on social change.
The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can't be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth.
I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn't change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.
I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.
Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.
Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.
I hope that there's a little black boy somewhere in Montana that never thought that he would see a reflection of himself, and he turns on the television, like, 'Oh my God, thank you.'
What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven't even happened yet.
Even if I don't finish, we need others to continue. It's got to keep going without me.
Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I'm borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.
My daddy thought - no, he expected - that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on.
But try if you can to support, whether it's AIDS or the cancer foundation, so that someone else might survive, might prosper, and might actually be cured of this dreaded disease.
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