Ideas of their own are a beautiful thing but alone they are weak and helpless. It is the great orators, thinkers and philosophers who create power from them, creating weapons that have defeated the most powerful of empires, overcome wars, ended oppression, and possibly saved humanity. It is not possible to overemphasise the importance of the words of wisdom which are so beautifully crafted and perfectly formed that they have altered everything that come after them. Ideas which have spread out across our world. Religions, governments, science and more all live because of these ideas sometimes spoken by the most powerful of men, but often rising from the lips of the poor and oppressed and gaining strength not by the voice of those who spoke them but by the force of their own momentum and the most powerful of these ideas are often those which can be held and understood in a single phrase.
The bulk of these simple saying can be found in religion in part because ideas of this strength have such importance that they create religion and partially because religion is a draw to those who wish to understand the world, and partially because the highest ideals of religion are ideas of the type I speak of. Here are a few of the most important of these ideas:
Jesus Christ: He who lives by the sword will die by the sword
Buddha: He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.
Muhammad: Even as the fingers of the two hands are equal, so are human beings equal to one another. No one has any right, not any preference to claim over another.
Solomon: Train up a child in the way that he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
But it is not only the religion leaders of history which speak to us with these important words of wisdom. Those who have lived in our lifetimes speak words of importance and beauty as well.
Martin Luther King, Jr.: I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
Dalai Lama: Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Mother Teresa: Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
Words of wisdom do not come only from those who spend their lives in the study of religion, many of the most important ideas and words of wisdom in our history come from those who have proved to be our greatest leaders and these words and ideas have lived on long past the time when the politics of the day had changed. These quotes are often far more pragmatic than those of the religious world but they are often just as important and useful.
Winston Churchill: It is said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others which have been tried.
Teddy Roosevelt: Speak softly and carry a big stick
Abraham Lincoln: You can not help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
Thomas Jefferson: Whenever you do a thing, though it can be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act if all the world were looking at you, and act accordingly.
George Washington: to be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace
Still more often though the most important quotes not from those who are in religious or governmental authority but simply by those who live in the world of the mind. Scientists, artist, poets, and others.
Alexander Pope: Fools rush in where angels fear to tread
Horace: Carpe Diem (seize the day)
Thomas Edison: I have not failed; I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
Earnest Hemingway: Never mistake motion for action
Vince Lombardi: It's not whether you get knocked down, its whether you get up.
John Wooden: failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
These are only a small scattering of ideas which have changed the world, but many of them are clear proof that the true power of humanity is not in the building of our technology or in the strength of our arms or the impressiveness of our tools, but in the power of our ideas, ideas that become all the more important as the changes in the world grow larger and stronger each day and threaten to wash us away.