Be who you are, said the Duchess to Alice, or, if you would like it put more simply, never try to be what you might have been or could have been other than what you should have been.
Most worshippers of God are intent on the advancement of their own destiny, not on His worship. In India, no one has ever claimed to be a prophet. The reason is that claims to divinity are customary.
Man has wanted to look beyond, wanted to expand himself; and all that we call progress, evolution, has been always measured by that one search, the search for human destiny, the search for God.
Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.
Our challenge is to join forces of the old and the new- experience and experiment, history and destiny, the world of man and the new world of science- but always in accordance with the never-changing word of God.
As long as men will not be freed from their errors and delusions, humanity will not be able to go towards ("marcher vers", Fr.) the accomplishment of its true destinies.
To wade in marshes and sea margins is the destiny of certain bird, and they are so accurately made for this that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.
So we have a choice to make. We can once again let Washington's bad habits stand in the way of progress. Or we can pull together and say that in America, our destiny isn't written for us but by us. We can place good ideas ahead of old ideological battles, and a sense of purpose above the same narrow partisanship. We can act boldly to turn crisis into opportunity and, together, write the next great chapter in our history and meet the test of our time.