Quotes
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Brian Urquhart

Brian Urquhart quotes

last updated: November 28, 2023

“The mythology about the UN is absolutely breathtaking. People believe it costs a great deal of money to the United States. Completely untrue: it doesn't. The United States makes a net gain. People believe it's a world government, although the UN is a pathetically weak organization which improvises in emergencies to try to prevent the worst from happening.”
-- Brian Urquhart

#Believe Quotes #Government Quotes #Organization Quotes

“Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
“The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.”
“I'm still agnostic. But in the words of Elton Richards, I'm now a reverant agnostic. Which isn't an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there's a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It's possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn't take away from its power or importance.”
“[The U.S. government] was tired of treaties. They were tired of sacred hills. They were tired of ghost dances. And they were tired of all the inconveniences of the Sioux. So they brought out their cannons. 'You want to be an Indian now?' they said, finger on the trigger.”
“It's embarrassing ... you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller's List.”
“Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”
“When we depend upon organizations, we get what organizations can do. But when we depend upon prayer, we get what God can do.”
“At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can't take anything, you won't get anything, and if you can't hold anything, you won't keep anything. And you can't take anything without organization.”
“Leaders are active instead of reactive, shaping ideas instead of responding to them. Leaders adopt a personal and active attitude toward goals. The influence a leader exerts in altering moods, evoking images and expectations, and in establishing specific desires and objectives determines the direction an organization takes. The net result of this influence is to change the way people think about what is desirable, possible, and necessary. In other words, leaders are visionaries and managers operate within those established visions.”
“Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short, of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal.”

Source : "Books of the Times" by Charles Poore, The New York Times, p. 23, April 20, 1953.

Brian Urquhart quotes

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