Powerful Words

Please, feel free to download this file and use these quotes in your work or your writing. If you find other words that have been especially meaningful to you in your work, please e-mail them to NSDCJoan@aol.com and we'll add them to this list.

Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.
W.B. Yeats

If you do not have the time to read, you do not have the time to lead.
- Phillip Schlechty

Students are volunteers, whether we want them to be or not. Their attendance can be commanded, but their attention must be earned. Their compliance can be insisted on, but their commitment is under their own control.
- Phillip Schlechty

If you think of vision and mission as an organization's head and heart, the values its holds are its soul.
From Making Common Sense Common Practice, by Buzzotta/Lefton/Cheney/Beatty (New Leaders Press)

Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.
Charles Kettering

There are really only three types of people: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who say, What happened?
Ann Landers


Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw

Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.
Richard Hooker

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in travelling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.
Washington Irving

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.
G.K. Chesterton

There is no way to make people like change. You can only make them feel less threatened by it.
Frederick Hayes

The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
George Kettering

There is nothing permanent except change.
Greek Proverb

Times change and we change with them.
Latin proverb

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Leo Tolstoy

If we don't change the direction we're going, we're likely to end up where we are headed.
Chinese proverb

The best teacher is the one who suggests, rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, English Novelist

Self-initiated learning, once begun, develops its own momentum.
Ray Hartjen

Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.
Pema Chodron, from her book, When Things Fall Apart

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
John Dewey

A mind stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.
Theodore Roosevelt

Even when I was young I suspected that much might be done in a better way.
Henry Ford, Sr.

We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.
Margaret Mead

No matter how far you have gone on a wrong road, turn back.
Turkish proverb

"Efficiency is donig the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing."
Peter F. Drucker

Reform must come from within, not from without.
James Gibbons

Every reform was once a private opinion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

We only think when we are confronted with a problem.
John Dewey

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
Winston Churchill

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
Jonathan Swift

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Proverbs 29:18

"We must always change, renew, rejuvenate overselves; otherwise, we harden."
-- Goethe

"Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down."
-- William M. Winans

"Don't be afraid to take a big step. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."

"A person who follows in another's track leaves no footprints."