A Quote by Ariel Durant

The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact...Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

Ariel Durant

Quote Topics

Agriculture Character Civilization Earth Fact Factors Followers Grows Hardy Imagination Industry Influence Initiative Leaders Makes Man May Mining Offer Only Opportunities Possibilities Technology Terrain Trade Transform

Quote Author

Ariel Durant
American - Author
May 10, 1898 - October 25, 1981

Not many of us will be leaders; and even those who are leaders must also be followers much of the time. This is the crucial role. Followers judge leaders. Only if the leaders pass that test do they have any impact. The potential followers, if their judgment is poor, have judged themselves. If the leader takes his or her followers to the goal, to great achievements, it is because the followers were capable of that kind of response.

Garry Wills

If the white man can come here uneducated and as an immigrant, and within 10 or 15 years set up an industry that provides job opportunities and educational opportunities for black people, then if the black man, the black leadership, who has access to all of this money and has all of these degrees today, can't use his talent and his know-how to set up business opportunities, job opportunities, housing opportunities for the black people the same as the white leaders have done for white people, then these black leaders need to get off the boat.

Malcolm X

Agriculture is the most destructive industry that we have. More than coal mining and other extractive industries.

Allan Savory

What makes a good follower? The single most important characteristic may well be a willingness to tell the truth. In a world of growing complexity leaders are increasingly dependent on their subordinates for good information, whether the leaders want to hear it or not. Followers who tell the truth and leaders who listen to it are an unbeatable combination.

Warren G. Bennis

As long as man was small in numbers and limited in technology, he could realistically regard the earth as an infinite reservoir, an infinite source of inputs and an infinite cesspool for outputs. Today we can no longer make this assumption. Earth has become a space ship, not only in our imagination but also in the hard realities of the social, biological, and physical system in which man is enmeshed.

Kenneth E. Boulding

Afghanistan has the capacity to become an industrialized country because of its mining and agriculture sectors. We can also create jobs for educated men and women by investing in information technology.

Ashraf Ghani

The Nuffield report suggests that there is a moral imperative for investment into GM crop research in developing countries. But the moral imperative is in fact the opposite. The policy of drawing of funds away from low-cost sustainable agriculture research, towards hi-tech, exclusive, expensive and unsafe technology is itself ethically questionable. There is a strong moral argument that the funding of GM technology in agriculture is harming the long-term sustainability of agriculture in the developing world.

Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher

Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.

Aldo Leopold

How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry-between say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is "accepted" as a "trade-off." Were the catastrophes of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war or of peace? They were in fact, peacetime acts of aggression, intentional to the extent that the risks were known and ignored.

Wendell Berry

Leaders evoke emotional connections in followers only to the extent that the followers are emotionally needy.

Judith M Bardwick

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.

Charles Kettering

Money alone cannot build character or transform evil into good. It cries for full partnership with leaders of character and good will who value good tools in the creation and enlargement of life for Man.

Sebastian Spering Kresge

I like a character that is still alive and is necessarily thinking, and either grows or diminishes or whatever.

Martin Landau

All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Galactica has infinite possibilities. In fact, my character may be abnormal in the sense that she may be more independent than most of the women in classic space adventures.