Who Are The True Builders?

You look in your history-books to see who built Westminster Abbey, who built St Sophia at Constantinople, and they tell you Henry Ill, Justinian the Emperor. Did they? Or, rather, men like you and me, handicraftsmen, who have left no names behind them, nothing but their work?

William Morris, “The Lesser Arts” (1878) quoted in “VISTA – the culture and politics of gardens”

Nelson Mandela

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

Nelson Mandela

MLK Jr. Quote

“It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

John Steinbeck

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

 

John Steinbeck

Bertand Russell

There are some activities in which the motive for private profit leads, on the whole, to the promotion of the general interest and others in which this is not so. Finance is now definitely in the latter class.

Bertrand Russell

Modern Midas – 1933

Louis Brandeis

“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

JFK

“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

John. F. Kennedy

Keynes

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”

John Maynard Keynes