Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth Quotes

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.

I have the impression that when we talk so confidently of liberty, we are unaware of the awful … servitude of poverty when means are so small that there is literally no choice at all.

the distinction between rich nations and poor nations is one of the great dominant political and international themes of our century.

Every single ancient wisdom and religion will tell you the same thing – don’t live entirely for yourself, live for other people. Don’t get stuck inside your own ego, because it will become a prison in no time flat.

[To the cultures of Asia and the continent of Africa] it is the Western impact which has stirred up the winds of change and set the processes of modernization in motion. Education brought not only the idea of equality but also another belief which we used to take for granted in the West-the idea of progress, the idea that science and technology can be used to better human conditions. In ancient society, men tended to believe themselves fortunate if tomorrow was not worse than today and anyway, there was little they could do about it.

Our physical unity has gone far ahead of our moral unity.

To act without rapacity, to use knowledge with wisdom, to respect interdependence, to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival.

If a man has lived in a tradition which tells him that nothing can be done about his human condition, to believe that progress is possible may well be the greatest revolution of all.

It is only when people begin to shake loose from their preconceptions, from the ideas that have dominated them, that we begin to receive a sense of opening, a sense of vision…That is the sort of time we live in now. We…live in an epoch in which the solid ground of our preconceived ideas shakes daily under our uncertain feet.

It is a truism that one person who wants something is a hundred times stronger than a hundred who want to be left alone.

There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavour and then leave it half done.

in modern society, fear of unemployment remains the darkest of the shadows thrown by the past. In an industrial order, a man out of work is almost a man out of life.