A Quote by James H. Billington

Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.

James H. Billington

Quote Topics

Breakdown Cultural Freedom Important Intellectual Kinds Most Single Systems The Most Important Threaten Totalitarian Tyrannical Us

Quote Author

James H. Billington
American - Librarian
Born: June 1, 1929

People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!

Jared Diamond

What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us, but makes us intellectual beings.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Games are unquestionably the single most important cultural form of the digital age.

Cathy Davidson

The five most important words a leader can speak are - 'I am proud of you' The four most important are - 'What is your opinion?' The three most important are - 'If you please' The two most important are - 'Thank You' And the most important single word of all is - 'You'

Denis Waitley

We are losing our living systems, social systems, cultural systems, governing systems, stability, and our constitutional health, and we're surrendering it all at the same time.

Paul Hawken

I think the Russians basically don't think the North Koreans and the Iranians have the capabilities to get weapon systems that can threaten them, or that if they do the Russians know how to handle them and that that's the reason that it's all the more important that Russians be involved in the sale of high-end conventional weapons, the Bushehr nuclear reactor in the case of Russia and Iran, and similar kinds of relationships.

John Bolton

Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands.

Friedrich Durrenmatt

Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.

Nelson Mandela

When totalitarian regimes are established, they at least have the illusion of the single-minded purpose. But once they establish the stature that's necessary for a totalitarian regime, they tend to flail.

Masha Gessen

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.

Christopher Morley

The tragedy is that in the name of resisting the internal deterioration of faith and the corruption of the world around them, many Christians - and Christian conservatives most significantly -unwittingly embrace some of the most corrosive aspects of the cultural disintegration they decry. By nurturing its resentments, sustaining them through a discourse of negation toward outsiders, and in cases, pursuing their will to power, they become functional Nietzscheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive resist.

James Davison Hunter

Talent is important. But the single most important ingredient after you get the talent is internal leadership. It's not the coaches as much as one single person or people on the team who set higher standards than that team would normally set for itself. I really believe that that's been ultimately important for us.

Mike Krzyzewski

Cease fire is the main and the most important precondition for launching an implementation of the Minsk agreement.

Petro Poroshenko

Limitation of means is a precondition of excellence. Creative freedom chooses its limitations. Destructive freedom rejects them heedlessly.

Walter Darby Bannard

We don't have the leadership or the understanding of the value of this, and when your political systems and your economic systems start to fail, it's only a cultural understanding that allows you to reconstruct them and to get back to who you are. For some reason, it hasn't dawned on us yet.