These universal quotes will inspire you. Universal, including or covering all or a whole collectively or distributively without limit or exception.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, knowledgeable, and encouraging universal quotes, universal sayings, and universal proverbs.
Best Universal Quotes
- “You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.” ~ Tim Berners-Lee
- “Our ultimate weapon is not our guns but our beliefs … Ours are not Western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit and anywhere, any time, ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same. Freedom, not tyranny. Democracy, not dictatorship. The rule of law not the rule of the secret police. The spread of freedom is the best security for the free. It is our last line of defense and our first line of attack.” ~ Tony Blair
- “In these days of political, personal, and economic disintegration, music is not a luxury, it’s a necessity; not simply because it is therapeutic, nor because it is the universal language, but because it is the persistent focus of our intelligence, aspiration, and goodwill.” ~ Robert Lawson Shaw
- “God is the universal substance in existing things. He comprises all things. He is the fountain of all being. In Him exists everything that is.” ~ Giordano Bruno
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“The ‘almighty dollar’ is the true divinity, and its worship is universal.” ~ Isabella Bird
- “As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn’t let it go for less than half-a-crown.” ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg
- “As an artist, you’re looking for universal triggers. You want it both ways. You want it to have an immediate impact, and you want it to have deep meanings as well. I’m striving for both. But I hate it when people write things that sound like they’ve swallowed a f… dictionary.” ~ Damien Hirst
- “I feel that faith and feminism have a deep relationship to each other and that both are responses to the deep human yearning for connection and for peace on earth, and that they both have a vision of universal human equity.” ~ Helen LaKelly Hunt
- “The lessons of nonviolence are universal. Not just for America.” ~ John Lewis
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“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “The idea of universal human rights may not seem as weird to some people as the idea of a personal God, but it is still a metaphysical idea that liberalism, at least as we know it, couldn’t really survive without.” ~ Ross Douthat
- “There was a deliberate decision after the failure of the League of Nations to make the next attempt to establish a global political actor sensitive to geopolitical realities. The underlying idea was to provide major states, defined in 1945 by reference to the winners in the Second World War (now an anachronism), with assurance that they could take part in the UN without jeopardizing their national interests. In this regard, the UN has succeeded, as none of the big countries has withdrawn, and the Organisation has managed to achieve virtually universal membership of all sovereign states.” ~ Richard A. Falk
- “The UDHR has become an iconic document over the course of more than six decades, the starting point for discussions of whether or not the rights as set forth are truly universal or slanted to reflect the hegemony of Western values, especially those associated with liberal individualism.” ~ Richard A. Falk
- “On the one side, I welcome prosecutions of individuals such as Pinochet and would welcome the indictment, prosecution, and punishment of Kissinger. On the other side is the geopolitical reality that only those in the global South are likely to experience the impact of Universal Jurisdiction.” ~ Richard A. Falk
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“Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life.” ~ Paulo Coelho
- “This issue of expanding the reach of international criminal law by reliance on the use of Universal Jurisdiction by domestic courts needs to be balanced against the injustice of according impunity to those with strong geopolitical backing. It is notable that several western European countries backtracked on UJ after threats of retaliatory moves by the United States and Israel. There is no doubt that the domain of UJ is a geopolitical battleground.” ~ Richard A. Falk
- “The fact that Universal Jurisdiction exists in relation to serious international crimes does convey two important aspects of the global reality: first, that such individuals would be held accountable if international law was applied without regard to geopolitics, and second, that there is enough ambiguity about the reach of UJ that it inhibits such individuals and conveys an impression of de facto criminality.” ~ Richard A. Falk
- “The weaknesses and biases of the international mechanisms of accountability make it seem desirable to extend the domain of accountability by empowering domestic courts to act as agents of the world legal system. Even if there is no consistent application of Universal Jurisdiction, it still leads those who might be prosecuted to alter their travel plans to avoid even the complication of waiting for a complaint to be dismissed.” ~ Richard A. Falk
- “On the cautionary side, Universal Jurisdiction could be used to achieve some kind of ideologically motivated criminalization of ‘the other’ that would discredit and derail a constructive effort to develop a credible meta-law that governs the behavior of leaders of sovereign states.” ~ Richard A. Falk
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“It’s been a long time since universal suffrage, and I’m sick of the old white men running the show.” ~ Cate Blanchett
- “As Muslims, we are all equals, we abide by the laws and we understand that we have to be active citizens wherever we are. Our goals are first to live by our principles, to remind people of these values, to reconcile our respective societies with these shared universal values, and to try our best to push for a spiritual agenda with more ethics in society, in politics, in economics, and in culture.” ~ Tariq Ramadan
- “The singularity of Islam is its universality. As American citizens and as Muslims, you need to show there is something specific, namely our moral singularity. We believe there is one God and this one God is pushing us to reach universal values by liberating ourselves from our ego and by serving humanity. We must be involved in this by all means necessary, in a nonviolent way, through the legal, media, economic and cultural systems. We cannot achieve this if there is no courage if we are not ready to sacrifice.” ~ Tariq Ramadan
- “I don’t see myself as a deep philosopher. The things I write about tend to be what we all have to face or consider, or experience, that I talk about with my friends and brothers. It’s universal stuff, told in my own voice, my own details and truth, which is all I have to offer.” ~ Anne Lamott , Universal quotes truth
- “The stuff I write about is pretty universal, the things my closest friends and I talk about – our anxiety about being here on this scary planet, during these scary times, as vulnerable as kittens, having lost so many people I couldn’t live without.” ~ Anne Lamott
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“In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “For me people are people, without meaning to sound corny, it’s a plain natural fact, music is a universal language and I’ve always known that and observed that and treated music with great respect accordingly.” ~ John Lydon
- “Hard power makes sense under some circumstances. But there’s not a universal solution to global problems. A major country like the United States has to have a broadly-conceived program for effective international action, influence and cooperation with others.” ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski
- “Russia is a place of great culture. If you’ve read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov…the culture of the great Russian literature is amazing. The human narrative you get out of “War and Peace” is universal.” ~ Andre Leon Talley
- “It’s not my intention to be understood. I will continue writing for a readership that is fundamentally local. Because if you want to produce universal writing, you run the risk of losing your local knowledge. Your views are so universalist that the street aspect disappears.” ~ Sarnath Banerjee
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“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” ~ Aristotle
- “Music is the universal language, it evokes an emotion in all of us. That, we can all look at each other and we may not speak the same language, but that song or that melody can make us feel the same thing. And we can look at each other and agree and be like, “that did something for us”. It makes us feel unified and connected.” ~ Kerry James Marshall
- “There’s no way anyone’s going to understand my own personal experiences, where the songs came from, because they’re mine. But I was very conscious of leaving loads of space in the songs so that people could interpret them with their own memories, feelings, and emotions. I love the process of taking stuff away so that people could finish the songs themselves. I was hoping it’d end up being as universal as possible, even though it comes from the most personal place.” ~ Conor O’Brien
- “It’s one of the bases of all human existence – the relation between parents and children, whether biologically or metaphorically. It’s something we can never get away from, even in a civilization where we’re controlled by robots. It’s the basic relationship between mature people who represent paternal and maternal figures and young people. It’s universal – it’s part of human existence. It’s always been that way, and it will always be that way if humans remain around.” ~ Eugene Green
- “It’s the true meaning of music being a universal language, constantly fighting and going through different boundaries in order for new people to hear the music and be like, “Oh, sh*t! I mess with this Pitbull kid.”” ~ Pitbull
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“Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
- “I would like to see an agreement that recognizes that we live on the same planet and that some interests, such as human rights, must be universal and that all religions must be respected.” ~ Ninian Smart
- “When I was a little kid – and even still – I loved magic tricks. When I saw how movies got made – at least had a glimpse when I went on the Universal Studios tour with my grandfather, I remember feeling like this was another means by which I could do magic.” ~ J. J. Abrams
- “It is on balance desirable to encourage Universal Jurisdiction and to create pressure from below to make application of such jurisdiction as consistent as possible. I think this will act as a deterrent in some situations, although this impact will never be acknowledged by those affected as it would only embolden civil society to intensify its pressures.” ~ Richard A. Falk
- “Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.” ~ Hannah Arendt
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“Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all-time low over the world.” ~ Isaac Asimov
- “Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?” ~ David Attenborough
- “Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.” ~ Margaret Atwood
- “The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
- “I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.” ~ Francis Bacon
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“I’m no politician. I’m an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education.” ~ Stephen Ambrose
- “A Truth is the subjective development of that which is at once both new and universal. New: that which is unforeseen by the order of creation. Universal: that which can interest, rightly, every human individual, according to his pure humanity.” ~ Alain Badiou
- “Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance, and art would be useless.” ~ Honore de Balzac
- “We also want to try and slow down all this foolishness that’s going on between the East and West. We gotta understand that Hip Hop is now universal. Hip Hop is not East coast or West coast.” ~ Afrika Bambaataa
- “I try to do women’s point-of-view comedy. The joke is, ‘This is what I think; there’s the truth.’ I try to think of stuff that’s real broad, but the more personal it is, the more universal it is. All my friends go through the same stuff.” ~ Roseanne Barr
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“It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.” ~ Charles Baudelaire
- “Our religion is itself profoundly sad – a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man’s own language – so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.” ~ Charles Baudelaire
- “Republican values – strong families, faith, personal responsibility, and freedom, among others – are not unique to specific subsets of the electorate. They are universal values, and it is Republicans’ job to remind Americans of that fact.” ~ Gary Bauer
- “There is no faculty of the human soul so persistent and universal as that of hatred.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher
- “Man is ever searching for the source whence he has come, searching for the life which is upwelling within him, immortal, nay, eternal and divine, and every religion is the answer from the Universal Spirit to the seeking spirits of men that came forth from Him.” ~ Annie Besant , Universal quotes about life
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“If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.” ~ Samuel Butler
- “On the one hand we have got to ask, are there some areas of universal benefits that are no longer affordable? But on the other hand let us look at the issue of dependency where we have trapped people in poverty through the extent of welfare that they have.” ~ David Cameron
- “I believe there’s no proverb but what is true; they are all so many sentences and maxims drawn from experience, the universal mother of sciences.” ~ Miguel de Cervantes
- “Love is the internal, affectively apprehended, aspect of the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , Universal quotes about love
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“Loneliness is the universal problem of rich people.” ~ Joan Collins
- “None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, political cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much.” ~ Lydia M. Child
- “Be universal in your love. You will see the universe to be the picture of your own being.” ~ Sri Chinmoy
- “It’s perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “And for me anyway, consciousness is three components: a personal component which for lack of a better word we can call the soul. A collective component which is more archetypal and a deeper level, and then a universal domain of consciousness.” ~ Deepak Chopra
- “Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable.” ~ Charles Caleb Colton
