long-term thinking
-
Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder city, the men of the nineteenth century built slums … [which] on the test of private enterprise, ‘paid,’ whereas the wonder city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have ‘mortgaged the future’ … The same rule of self-destructive financial calculation governs every walk of life. We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the un-appropriated splendors of nature have no economic value. We are capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend.
John Maynard Keynes -
… I think that the creation of a new political world order requires that special attention to be paid to the problem of borders between individual spheres of civilization, a problem that can be solved only if the spheres that are momentarily wealthier cease to consider themselves superior to those that are momentarily poorer.
Václav Havel -
I think that it’s a sad thing that the parties, rather than thinking about which system is best for the country, always think first of all which system is best for them at a particular time. Consequently their positions on referenda, the direct election of the president, the electoral system, and similar themes are constantly changing, or rather, being passed from party to party like a relay baton.
Václav Havel