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.
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.
Well I think it is often the case that the biggest bullies take what they know to be their own defects, as they see it, and they put them right on someone else and then they try and destroy the other and that's what Voldemort does.
...there is one thing that all Satan's cunning and all the snares of temptation cannot take by surprise - an undivided will.
The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.
If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")
Everyone has two memories. The one you can tell and the one that is stuck to the underside of that, the dark, tarry smear of what happened.
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