....Man's struggle to be rational about himself, about his relationship to his own society and to other peoples and nations involves a constant search for understanding among all peoples and all cultures-a search that can only be effective when learning is pursued on a worldwide basis.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of global understanding and learning in addressing human relationships and societal challenges.
J. William Fulbright's quote expresses the idea that in order to navigate the complexities of human relationships and societal structures, a rational approach is necessary. This rationality can only be achieved through a continuous pursuit of knowledge that transcends cultural and national boundaries, enabling a collective understanding among diverse peoples. In essence, it advocates for education and learning as vital tools for fostering global harmony and comprehension.
In practice
During a school assembly to promote cultural exchange programs.
International educational exchange is the most significant current project designed to continue the process of humanizing mankind to the point, we would hope, that men can learn to live in peace-eventually even to cooperate in constructive activities rather than compete in a mindless contest of mutual destruction....We must try to expand the boundaries of human wisdom, empathy and perception, and there is no way of doing that except through education.
The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high.
Maturity requires a final accommodation between our aspirations and our limitations.
Finally, the Program aims, through these means, to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship.
In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.
We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every ten minutes.
The real role of leadership in education ... is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility.
Literature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it's the only place where we can keep track of ideas.
While the books I read as a child lacked diversity in the strict sense, they didn't lack values. Reading, I didn't see me externally, but I felt me - my humanity.
Have we forgotten about the children, and thus forsaken the next generation?
One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago I met a little girl with a book under her arm. I asked her why she was out so early and she answered that there were too many books and far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.
The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable.
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