Manifesto For A Moral Revolution Quotes

you don’t plan your way into finding your purpose. You live into it.

Literature should be a kind of revolutionary manifesto against established morality and established society.

if you want to serve, you must begin by listening, not assuming.

Rather than being rewarded for what we give, we’re too often affirmed by what we take.

be more interested than interesting.

As Eleanor Roosevelt wrote long ago, the work of renewing a world based on extending dignity to every being on the planet begins in small places, close to home.

learn to listen with your whole body. Listen with your ears, your eyes, all your senses. Listen not to convince or to convert, but to change yourself, spark your moral imagination, soften your hardened edges, and open yourself to the world.

The point is this: We are the system. We decide how to define success, and we can reject purely individualistic terms.

the urgent challenge for our times is to reimagine capitalism as a tool to enable our wholeness rather than to reinforce our separation

With those you aim to serve or lead, your job is to be interested, to help make another person shine, not demonstrate how smart or good or capable you yourself are.

Solving complex problems is rarely accomplished with a silver bullet or a single approach.

We are made from what came before. We make ourselves out of the promises that lie ahead. And we are always in the process of becoming.

When individual listening is ingrained in collective culture, the whole community is more likely to shine.

cynics don’t build the future.

When we dare to understand the other, we find the seeds of our best selves.

Moral leadership requires the judgment to make the right short-term compromises so as to realize the long-term change we seek.

I believe individuals have a right to life and liberty and that physical aggression should be used only defensively. We should respect each other as rational beings by trying to achieve our goals through reason and persuasion rather than threats and coercion. That, and not a desire for “economic efficiency,” is the primary moral reason for opposing government intrusions into our lives: government is force, not reason. People

This is the secret of accompaniment. I will hold a mirror to you and show you your value, bear witness to your suffering, and to your light. And over time, you will do the same for me, for within the relationship lies the promise of our shared dignity and the mutual encouragement needed to do the hard things. Whatever you aim to do, whatever problem you hope to address, remember to accompany those who are struggling, those who are left out, who lack the capabilities needed to solve their own problems. We are each other’s destiny. Beneath the hard skills and firm strategic priorities needed to resolve our greatest challenges lies the soft, fertile ground of our shared humanity. In that place of hard and soft is sustenance enough to nourish the entire human family.

the actions of village communes against landlords were often scrupulously articulated in terms of a moral economy of justice. Sometimes this entailed the presentation of their demands in quasi-legal form, through manifestos and declarations formulated by sympathetic local intellectuals, or in the careful prolixity of autodidacts. This was an ad hoc realisation of the traditional chiliastic yearning for equal shares of the land for all who worked it – ‘black repartition

pounds….” Thomas Jefferson had written a paragraph of the Declaration accusing the King of transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies and “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.” This seemed to express moral indignation against slavery and the slave trade (Jefferson’s personal distaste for slavery must be put alongside the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves to the day he died). Behind it was the growing fear among Virginians and some other southerners about the growing number of black slaves in the colonies (20 percent of the total population) and the threat of slave revolts as the number of slaves increased. Jefferson’s paragraph was removed by the Continental Congress, because slaveholders themselves disagreed about the desirability of ending the slave trade. So even that gesture toward the black slave was omitted in the great manifesto of freedom of the American Revolution.

This book assumes that you are interested in being part of world-changing human capital that will help solve problems big and small. Maybe you are a teacher or a communicator, an activist or a doctor, a lawyer or an investor, or some new force for positive change. I have seen people like you alter the lives of schoolchildren and street children, refugees, the formerly incarcerated; of people living in forgotten communities and in places ravaged by war, poverty, or toxic industries.

What happens to the earth if we see it as a resource but not a responsibility?

Purpose does not reveal itself to those sitting safely at the starting block. In other words, you don’t plan your way into finding your purpose. You live into it.

defining success by how others fare because of your efforts,

every problem is an opportunity for us to act.

We can disagree on the specifics of what humans need to succeed, but if our starting point is an environmentally sustainable world that enables all its inhabitants to flourish, then we’ve got the foundation for a moral framework.

In a world of extreme inequality, what kind of economic system is just? By conforming to a system structured solely to maximize shareholder returns, we avoid taking personal responsibility for the answer to that moral question.

The current economic system keeps the attention on what we can count (profits) rather than on what we most value (our children’s health and education, the quality of the air we breathe, just compensation to the poorest, etc.).

thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the ocean in a drop.

The more you are aware of the power you maintain in each situation, the more likely you are to gain a truer understanding of others.

Ultimately, our future as a human race depends on all of us subscribing to a revolution of morals in which we each commit ourselves to something beyond ourselves.

But if you want to play it safe, you shouldn’t get into the business of change. Change involves risk, and risk, which is not the same as recklessness, requires courage.

We are the ones who choose the kind of economy and society we inhabit. We can continue to play by tired rules that work only for the few, at the expense of the many, or we can imagine and build new rules that work for everyone.

Changing systems for the poor, not just the rich, requires understanding how to use markets and how to partner with government, which means moving from small-scale purity to the messy and complex thickness of scale.

In times of both success and failure, we can choose with whom we stand. Going beyond yourself to enable others not just to persevere but to thrive lies at the heart of accompaniment.

The job of the moral leader—which is the job of all of us—is to learn to tell the stories that matter,

As the philosopher Plato wrote, “What is honored in a country is cultivated there.

Anger can go a long way, yet it eventually whittles the soul.

Beauty is an expression of human dignity.

We are on dangerous ground when “faith” becomes associated with political parties, or when nonbelievers are seen as heretics rather than seekers.

We commit ourselves to being members of a single human family, beyond any nation or religion, caste or tribe. This work is difficult and it is long, but it is the work of the moral revolution, the only way to build a future that will sustain us.

the decision we face is not to chart the perfect way forward; it is simply to embark on a journey.

Privilege can deafen us to those who feel less worthy or valuable. Those for whom the system “works” can easily become accustomed to the world rolling out a welcome mat and learn to behave as if every place were our exclusive domain.

No one escapes life without broken parts.

If you define patriotism as being the best at the expense of other peoples and nations, and if you blame others for your own problems or refuse to engage, then you cannot be a patriot and a global citizen.

As the American civil rights advocate Bryan Stevenson has said, “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.

John’s was a lived and practical wisdom. “The self-renewing man,” he wrote, “looks forward to an endless and unpredictable dialogue between his potentialities and the claims of life—not only the claims he encounters but the claims he invents.” He was a half century older than me, but John’s enduring curiosity, his sense of possibility and willingness to try made him seem the youngest person I knew. So, just start.

Moral imagination means to view other people’s problems as if they were your own, and to begin to discern how to tackle those problems. And then to act accordingly. It summons us to understand and transcend the realities of current circumstances and to envision a better future for ourselves and others. Moral imagination starts with empathy, but it does not content itself simply to feel another’s pain. Empathy without action risks reinforcing the status quo. Rather, moral imagination is muscular, built from the bottom up and grounded through immersion in the lives of others. It involves connecting on a human level, analyzing the systemic issues at play, and only then envisioning how to go beyond applying a Band-Aid to making a long-term difference.

Strategically, as my friend and founding Acumen board member Stuart Davidson says, “If you want advice, ask for money. If you want to raise money, ask for advice.” We all yearn to be recognized.

And while the first or second or sometimes tenth time I tried something might still feel uncomfortable, each experience expanded my worldview, even the most incremental of victories imparting me with the belief that life could be a great adventure if you were willing to dare.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie to-day, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting class thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

That night in Kigali, I renewed my commitment to working toward dreams so big that they may not be completed in my lifetime.

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