A Quote by Elizabeth Kostova

The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.

Elizabeth Kostova

Quote Topics

Best Centuries Die Efforts End Even Generations Humankind Impulses Individual Individual Effort Lifetime Our Single Single Life Survive Us Very Worst

Quote Author

Elizabeth Kostova
American - Author
Born: December 26, 1964

Our efforts to counter hatred, intolerance, and indifference must continue simultaneously at individual and structural levels. We must try to influence for good the minds and hearts of individual people through dialogue and confidence building. These efforts must be reinforced by our efforts to create just structures in society to support the ongoing work of negotiations in the human community. Only then will we have a chance to negate the terrible consequences of the tremendous conflicts facing humankind today.

Nelson Mandela

Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.

Mikhail Bakunin

Realizing the ways in which we humans may have been inadvertently changing our genes for millennia provides a way for us to begin to think about the inevitable genetic revolution in medicine that is going to allow us to advertently change our genes over centuries and even decades.

Nicholas A. Christakis

The miracle is that, in most cases, he succeeds - for the powers of survival, of the will to survive, and to survive as a unique inalienable individual, are absolutely, the strongest in our being: stronger than any impulses, stronger than disease.

Oliver Sacks

Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but superior - yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.

Soren Kierkegaard

No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individual.

Frank Herbert

The longer I live, the more I feel that the individual is not so much to blame - not even the worst individuals, not even the 'best' citizens - as the system of corruption which has grown up about us, and which rewards an honest man with a mere living and a crook with all the magnificence of our magnificent modern life.

Lincoln Steffens

I know already that I can survive it. That's the sorrow of it all. That whatever comes I'll survive it. I mean, even if the worst were to be true, would it really be the worst?

Scott Hutchins

It's easy to forget that for centuries - for millennia - the 'workforce' was all of us.

Peter Diamandis

The best therapy for emotional blocks to math is the realization that the human race took centuries or millennia to see through the mist of difficulties and paradoxes which instructors now invite us to solve in a few minutes.

Lancelot Hogben

I think there's so much good in the worst of us, and so many of the worst of us get the best of us, that the rest of us aren't even worth talking about.

Gracie Allen

Adolescence is when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for possession.

G. Stanley Hall

Thinking about the new epoch - often called the Anthropocene, or the age of humanity - challenges us to look at ourselves in the mirror of deep time, measured not in centuries or even in millennia, but over millions and billions of years.

David Grinspoon

While our institutional mission and destiny are not in doubt, how we each participate and understand our individual responsibilities requires constant attention, effort, and vigilance. BYU will progress and prosper, but our individual success is not guaranteed without our own personal best efforts and worthily received blessings.

Cecil O. Samuelson

In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate.