COPE International-USA

Though you did not make the world as it is, you are nevertheless responsible for it.  This world now belongs to you....And the day is near when you may ask yourselves the most dangerous question of all:  Can I make a difference?  Can anyone make a difference?  Do not believe those who tell you that you do not matter, that you cannot change the world.  The world does not have to be the way it is.  You can make a difference.  You can make a difference.

                    --Ariel Dorfman, commencement address, American University, May 2001

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Sustainability:  "…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

                        --World Commission on the Environment and Development

                        The Brundtland Commission (Our Common Future, 1987)

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Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.

                        --John Wesley

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We can’t be free until we live, in some sense, for others.  Freedom is not self-indulgence.  It’s self-mastery and self-sacrifice to achieve goals that matter and accomplishments that last.

                        --Archbishop Charles Chaput, Denver, 2/1/01

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RULE #8:   Always carry more than your fair share.  When the trip is over, would you rather be remembered as a rock or a sissy?  Keep in mind that a pound or two of extra weight in your pack won't make your back hurt any more than it already does.  In any given group of flatlanders, somebody is bound to bicker about weight.  When an argument begins, take the extra weight yourself.  Then shake your head and gaze with pity upon the slothful one.  This is the mature response to childish behavior.  On the trail that day, during a break, load the tenderfoot's pack with 20 pounds of gravel.

                        --Howard Tombs

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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise:  that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.

                        --Aldo Leopold

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People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of each of your arms. As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands; one for helping yourself, and the other for helping others.

                        --Audrey Hepburn

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For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required.

                        --Luke, 12:48

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Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. 

                        --Sir Cecil Bacon

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Einstein was right when he said imagination is more important than knowledge.

                        --David Brooks, The Atlantic, December 2002

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Hope is different from optimism.  Hope is a tough virtue, not a psychological predisposition.  Hope insists on taking facts and reason into account and still insisting that improvement—along with, if you are religious, salvation—is always a real possibility.

                        --E.J. Dionne, 8.26.03

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A management team distracted by a series of short-term targets is as pointless as a dieter stepping on a scale every half-hour.

                        --Google Owner’s Manual

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…their sickles endlessly harvest the souls of the poor and helpless.  They have committed all these crimes with the purpose of establishing the kingdom of God on earth….the problem we face is not religious but political.  And so it will never be resolved with a religious summit.  If you hold a meeting of Muslim sheiks, Christian pastors and Jewish rabbis, they inevitably report…that they have found their values to be mostly identical, and they are right.  Extremism may claim God as its redeemer, but it’s really the selfish product of lunacy.

                        --Ali Salem, An Apology from an Arab, Time, 9.9.02

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If we poison our children with hatred, then the hard life is all they will know.

                        --Nanci Griffith, Hard Life

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The American idea, as I understand it, is to trust people to know their own minds and to act in their own enlightened self-interest, with a necessary respect for others.  Totalitarian governments promise relief for deprived and desperate people, but in the end are maintained in power by terrorism from above rather than the consent of the governed.  Empowerment of the individual was the idea in 1857, and…there is no better idea left standing.  The idea of individual freedom, undermined by a collectivist tide in the first half of the last century and disregarded by radical Islam today, now spreads…even under governments fearful of losing control.

                        --John Updike, “The Individual,” The Atlantic, November 2007, p. 14

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I wanted to use my life well.

                        --Helge Marcus

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Mother Teresa said each of us has to find our own Calcutta.

                        --Irwin Hentschel

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Oh, people, look among you. 

It’s there your hope must lie.

                        --Jackson Browne, Rock Me on the Water