prosperity

"Even though it will disappoint many of you, the evidence is that you have a very bright future." This is how I finished my presentation at American University, eliciting a few chuckles from the audience. On a more serious note, I asked the students to consider a radical proposition: Economic growth and technological progress are not enemies of the environment but are perhaps its best friends, since they allow us to reduce humanity's footprint on the natural world. High tech agriculture boosts farm productivity, which means a cheaper food supply and more land spared for nature. Better sewage treatment means that our rivers and streams can run freer of pollutants. Catalytic converters on cars and better filters on power-plant smokestacks have greatly reduced smog, smoke and soot in the air. But only rich societies can afford to pay for these. In the end, the best environmental program of all is the promotion of prosperity.

If you see yourself as prosperous, you will be. If you see yourself as continually hard up, that is exactly what you will be.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

Prosperity is no just scale; adversity is the only balance to weigh friends.

Prosperity is no just scale; adversity is the only balance to weigh friends.

If there is a conflict between the security of the sovereign state and the security of the human commonwealth, the human commonwealth comes first. If there is a conflict between the well-being of the nation and the well-being of humanity, the well-being of humanity comes first. If there is a conflict between the needs of this generation and the needs of all later generations, the needs of the later generations come first. If there is a conflict between public edict and private conscience, private conscience comes first. If there is a conflict between the easy drift of prosperity and the ordeal of peace, the ordeal of peace comes first.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

The trick is to make sure you don't die waiting for prosperity to come.