Quotes from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“. . . hope resides in the future, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“In Muslim societies, a person who has been manipulated unto believing in extremist violence or terrorism often seeks the permission of his mother before he may join a militant jihad and educated women as a rule, tend to withhold their blessings from such things.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“Because most of the girls were still in mourning and all of them had lost their textbooks, even pencils and pens, Shaukat Ali began the first classes by reading to them from poetry and religious texts. "Reading, literature, and spirituality are good for the soul," he told them. "So we will start with these studies.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“I'm no military expert, and these figures might not be exactly right,' I said. 'But as best I can tell, we've launched 114 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan so far. Now take the cost of one of those missiles, tipped with a Raytheon guidance system, which I think is about $840,000. For that much money, you could build dozens of schools that could provide tens of thousands of students with a balanced, non extremist education over the course of a generation. Which do you think will make us more secure?”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“They are a testament not only to the Afghans' hunger for literacy, but also to their willingness to pour scarce resources into this effort, even during a time of war. I have seen children studying in classrooms set up inside animal sheds, windowless basements, garages, and even an abandoned public toilet. We ourselves have run schools out of refugee tents, shipping containers, and the shells of bombed-out Soviet armored personnel carriers. The thirst for education over there is limitless. The Afghans want their children to go to school because literacy represents what neither we not anyone else has so far managed to offer them: hope, progress, and the possibility of controlling their own destiny.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“A wise man from my home once told me that these mountains have seen far too much suffering and killing, and that each rock and every boulder you see represents a mujahadeen who died fighting either the Russians or the Taliban. Then the man went on to say that now that the fighting is finished, it is time to build a new era of peace-and the first step in that process is to take up the stones and start turning them into schools.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“When ordinary human beings perform extraordinary acts of generosity, endurance or compassion, we are all made richer by their example. Like the rivers that flow out of the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, the inspiration they generate washes down to the rest of us. It waters everyone's fields.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“...we're also extremely sensitive to the difference between literacy and ideology. It is our belief that the first helps to thwart intolerance, challenge dogma, and reinforce our common humanity. The second does the opposite.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“the people who live in the last places - the people who are most neglected and least valued by the larger world - often represent the best of who we are and the finest standard of what we are meant to become. This is the power that last places hold over me, and why I have found it impossible to resist their pull.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“People who live in the last places-the people who are most neglected and least valued by the larger world- often represent the best of who we are and the finest standards of what we are to become.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“Eventually, I came to understand that a group of people who wield enormous power happen, oddly enough, to espouse some of the very same ideals imparted to me by people in Africa and central Asia who have no power at all. The reason for this, in my view, is that members of the armed forces have worked on the ground-in many cases, during three or four tours of duty-on a level that very few diplomats, academicians, journalists, or policy makers can match. And among other things, this experience has imbued soldiers with the gift of empathy.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“Despite everything that has befallen us, do we not continue to hold the destiny of this shattered and magnificent nation, together with the future of all our children-girls and boys alike-in the palm of our hands?”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“...education is a sacred thing, and the pledge to build a school is a commitment that cannot be surrendered or broken, regardless of how long it may take, how many obstacles must be surmounted, or how much money it will cost. It is by such promises that the balance sheet of one's life is measured.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“Today that legend is inscribed on the stones that were used to build the walls of the school, and as the water falls out of the sky and over those stones, the words of the legend are carried down from the mountains and into the fields and gardens and orchards of Afghanistan. And as the water and the words rush past, who can fail to turn to his neighbor and whisper, with humility and awe-if this is what the weakest, the least valued, the most neglected among us are capable of achieving, truly is there anything we cannot do?”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“When women take charge, things start to get out of control really fast.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“Two decades of virtually uninterrupted fighting had made even the most dignified structures appear drunken, wounded, or lost. The entire city seemed to affirm the notion that warfare is a disease.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“I have always been dismayed by the West’s failure—or unwillingness—to recognize that establishing secular schools that offer children a balanced and nonextremist form of education is probably the cheapest and most effective way of combating this kind of indoctrination.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“Хората, живеещи в пределите на цивилизацията, по правило не са сред най-изтънчените и космополитни човешки същества. Често са необразовани и не са в крак с модата и актуалните световни събития. Не са особено изискани, а понякога не са и дружелюбни. Но хората, които живеят в края на пътя, са сред най-жилавите и находчиви човешки същества, които можете да срещнете. Те се отличават с необикновено съчетание от храброст, твърдост, гостоприемство и състрадание, което предизвиква у мен истинско преклонение.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“When youu take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

“Днес на тази планета има 120 милиона деца в училищна възраст, които са лишени от образование поради полова дискриминация, бедност, експлоатация, религиозен екстремизъм и правителствена корупция.
Надявам се и се моля през следващото десетилетие да успеем да проправим път на образованието навсякъде и да осигурим обучение на всички тези деца, две трети от които са момичета. Нищо не би ме направило по-щастлив, ако книгата „Училища от камък” помогне за постигането на тази цел.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

About the author

Popular quotes

“I don’t know you? Hell, I know you! You’re a damn coward, is what you are! You’re afraid of living because you think it means giving up this cross you’ve been carrying around your whole life. But this time, you’ve gone too far. You think you’re the only one in the world with feelings? You think you’ll just walk away from Denise and everything’s going to go back to normal now? You think you’ll be happier? You won’t Taylor, You won’t let yourself do that.”
― Nicholas Sparks, quote from The Rescue

“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.
Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information -
That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony -
That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase -
That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -
That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia -
That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Mother Night

“Don't be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It's the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from A Dirty Job

“I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts. Who was it said that following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from The Girl on the Train

“It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Life, the Universe and Everything

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.