I promise to question everything my leaders tell me. I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make my own judgments.
Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.
Everything I have personally experienced, and that also has been expressed by the leaders of the great religions points to the fact that a global spirituality already exists and was intrinsically there from the start as God (by whatever name) is one and is indivisible - everywhere outside time and place.
America is America. It's a capitalist system. They [leaders] have enshrined that belief that profit matters more than anything else. The polarization of the society is just the resurfacing of that.
Likewise the leader of any state has to do the same, he has to enforce Shariah firmly, for he will be held in account later in the afterlife if he fails.
We must not fall into the trap of projecting our own morality onto the Soviet leaders. They do not share our aspirations, they are not constrained by our ethics, they always consider themselves exempt from the rules that bind other states.
As a matter of fact, the African Union itself estimated that every year corruption alone costs Africa $148 billion. If African leaders could cut that in half, they'll find more money than what Tony Blair is trying to raise for them.
We never really see the global situation as a total situation. Today's political leaders are still lacking of the vision. They very often just try to cope with their own election, their own popularity, solving the problem or selling the ideas to meet their own voters. By doing that, it creates a great imbalance in terms of making deals or treaty or all those things. Even today the borders they're seeing the physical borders are very different from the political borders. Because all those powers are so connected, and you cannot even see whose interest in what move.
It’s precisely the people who are considered the least ‘likely’ leaders who end up inspiring others the most. Everyday people and everyday acts of courage eventually change everything.
One of the great things about the United States is that when it comes to world affairs, the president obviously is the leader of the Executive Branch, the Commander-in-Chief, the spokesperson for the nation, but the influence and the work that we have is the result not just of the president, it is the result of countless interactions and arrangements and relationships between our military and other militaries, and our diplomats and other diplomats, the intelligence officers and development workers.