Quotes about vision
“I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.”
Dilbert
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Henry Ford - quoted in The Observer August 2005
Guidance is central to setting vision - Oswald Sanders' advice:
“I try to gather all the facts that are involved in a decision, and then weigh them up and pray them over in the Lord's presence, and trust the Holy Spirit to sway my mind in the direction of God's will. And God generally guides by presenting reasons to my mind for acting in a certain way.”
J Oswald Sanders in "Lessons I've Learned" - quoted in Christianity and Renewal, January 2003
And a caution from Duncan Campbell:
“These are days of much activity in the field of Church and mission work, but we do well to remember that no amount of activity in the kings service will make up for neglect of the king himself. I do not believe that the devil is greatly concerned about getting between us and work: his great concern is getting between us and God. Many a Christian worker has buried his spirituality in the grave of his activity.”
Duncan Campbell (Quoted by Mike Pilavachi in Christianity and Renewal March 2004 p 27]
Arthur Schlessinger was an advisor to John F Kennedy, this is an interesting sidelight on life in our church!
"Creative governments will always be 'out of channels', they will always present aspects of confusion... they will always discomfort officials whose routine is being disturbed or whose security is being threatened. But all this is inseparable from the process by which new ideas and new institutions enable government to meet new challenges. Orderly governments are very rarely creative, creative governments are almost never orderly."
Arthur Schleisinger Jnr. commenting on aspects of chaos in Kennedy's administration - to NY Times editor - Quoted in John F. Kennedy, an unfinished life , Robert Dallek
And the incomparable Roger McGough's poem:
The Leader
I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader
Can I? Can I?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee, I’m the leader
I’m the leader
OK what shall we do?
Roger McGough – Liverpool Poet
I find these last three quotations inspiring:
" This is the true joy of life, the being used up for a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. "
George Bernard Shaw – Irish Playwright
“At the end of the twentieth century, most of us will not have to Repent of the great evils we have done but of the apathy that has Prevented us from doing anything at all.”
Martin Luther King
We choose to go to the moon...
But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot as it is here today--and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out, then we must be bold.
John F. Kennedy – September 12th 1962