Be the Person You'd Want to Follow
Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest of walls of resistance.
Robert Kennedy… Read more »
When I was a young boy in Plains, Georgia, a beloved teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, introduced me to Leo Tolstoy’s novel, War and Peace. She interpreted that powerful narrative as a reminder that
the simple human attributes of goodness and truth can overcome great power.
She also taught us that
… Read more »an individual is not swept along on a tide of inevitability but can influence even the greatest human events.
… Read more »In college, during the summer months, I was employed as a forestry firefighter. On wildfires, working with hand tools like shovels, heavy rakes and axe-like hoes, we formed up in lines to cut firebreaks before the advancing fires. We were always told by out growling boss to “take a swipe, kid,” at the vegetation with your tools and leave the rest for the person behind you, When you looked back down the mountain at the end of our line of workers, you’d see a clear, clean line of firebreak.
The life of a man (or woman) consists not in seeing visions, and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanaugh
… Read more »Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
FoodCorps is a nationwide network of volunteers combating our country’s childhood obesity epidemic by organizing and recruiting volunteers to develop and coordinate:
The FoodCorps mission and organization emerged from hundreds of hours of conversations with the input of thousands of individuals in the many communities it now serves.… Read more »
… Read more »“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man (or woman) who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends him or herself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
My responsibility, our responsibility as lucky Americans, is to try to give back to this country as much as it has given us, as we continue our American journey together.
– Colin Powell, the late Secretary of State and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff… Read more »
… Read more »There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.