Quotations of Wisdom

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.

Good means not merely not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.

I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it.

The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity. Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions and exposed only to their spontaneously summoned, computer-stored and -distributed outflow of reliable-opinion-purged, experimentally verified data, shall indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday. They can lead all humanity into omnisuccessful survival as well as entrance into an utterly new era of human experience in an as-yet and ever-will-be fundamentally mysterious Universe. -- The Wellspring of Reality

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemorality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.

One conception of democracy has it that a democratic society is one in which the public has the means to participate in some meaningful way in the management of their own affairs and the means of information are open and free ... An alternative conception of democracy is that the public must be barred from managing of their own affairs and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled. -- Media Control - The Spectacular Achievement of Propaganda

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Some ideas are by frequency and strength of association so closely combined that they cannot be separated; if one exists, the other exists along with it in spite of whatever effort we make to disjoin them

If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

In the current climate of today's United States Senate it is rare to find opportunities where both sides can come together and work in the middle to craft a solution for our country's problems. Ted Kennedy, with all of his ideological verbosity and idealism was a rare person who at times could put aside differences and look for common solutions. Not many ever got to see that side of him, but as peers and colleagues we were able to share some of those moments.

The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.

Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.

Do not see yourself as the center of the universe wise and good and beautiful. Seek rather wisdom, goodness and beauty that you may honor them everywhere. -- Kung Fu television series, 1972

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Science is nothing but perception.

You've got to learn to survive a defeat. That's when you develop character.

Today's politics tends to focus on popularity and the games: who is supporting whom, the polls and the money, personalities over truth, substitutes for Reason.

Persevere and preserve yourselves for better circumstances.

Don't worry over what the newspapers say. I don't. Why should anyone else? I told the truth to the newspaper correspondents - but when you tell the truth to them they are at sea.

The value of our good is not measured by what it does, but by the amount of good it does to the one concerned.

A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. -- From the movie Annie Hall

We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. 1984

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

We are the spirit the collective conscience. -- From the lyrics of "Heaven's Here on Earth, Album New Beginning"

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.

Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.

The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.

It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance.

The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them.

I think journalism gets measured by the quality of information it presents, not the drama or the pyrotechnics associated with us.

An ordinary human being, with a personal conscience, personally answering for something to somebody and personally and directly taking responsibility, seems to be receding farther and farther from the realm of politics. Politicians seem to turn into puppets that only look human and move in a giant, rather inhuman theatre; they appear to become merely cogs in a huge machine, objects of a major civilizational automatism which has gotten out of control and for which nobody is responsible.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Courage consists not in hazarding without fear; but being resolutely minded in a just cause.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

We have to realize that people are not born with hatred. They acquire it. We have the responsibility to listen to the voices of history so that future generations never forget what so few lived to tell!

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.

While I accept the Christian beliefs, I reject the absolutism and rigidity which is too often part of Christian followers as well as those of other faiths. I believe that logic an lead to a belief in a Supreme Being, whatever the name.

Therefore, I feel convinced that any political picture can be changed to suit the needs of the powers that be.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Not too many years ago cynics and many religious leaders said that slavery has always existed and will always be part of humanity's history and it is folly to pretend otherwise. Somehow we moved away from slavery. Key leaders and a small number of dedicated citizens asked us to do better.

Since I cannot govern my own tongue, tho' within my own teeth, how can I hope to govern the tongues of others?

Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

With attention deficit democracy, I am trying to wake up people to how the combination of mass ignorance, fear mongering by the government, and lying politicians is putting our entire system of government to a death spiral.

And what is seen in the last couple of weeks is that people want to have created for them a form where they can be disruptive rather than actually providing the information in a way that's going to give me their perspective and educate me on their point of view.

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

Share our similarities, celebrate our differences.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

Pleasant it to behold great encounters of warfare arrayed over the plains, with no part of yours in peril.

God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling the desire.

Basically what they're saying is, if you want to be on TV, if you want to be a credible candidate, you've got to buy ads. And if you're not buying ads, you're not a credible candidate, we don't cover you.

Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problem.

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.

The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power.

Can we fathom more than a subatomic point of view?

Most of us really aren't horribly unique. There are 6 billion of us. Put 'em all in one room and very few would stand out as individuals. So maybe we ought to think of worth in terms of our ability to get along as a part of nature, rather than being the lords over nature.

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.

The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

As historians and social critics have noted, inherent in corporate liberalism is the idea that the corporation, not the individual, is at the center of protection. -- Democracy, Inc -- Introduction Page 7.

A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.

There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.

A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.

How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.

But when people in the name of any religion claims to have the sole possession of truth, they have crossed the line from faith to arrogance.

Justice has nothing to do with what goes on in a courtroom; Justice is what comes out of a courtroom.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

I am a huge believer in giving back and helping out in the community and the world. Think globally, act locally I suppose. I believe that the measure of a person's life is the affect they have on others.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

Who among us is without flaw? -- Kung Fu television series 1972

We believe, in fact, that the one act of respect has little force unless matched by the other, in balance with it. The acting out of that dual respect I would name as precisely the source of our power.

Any effort which has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.

You cannot measure a man by his failures. You must know what use he makes of them. What did they mean to him. What did he get out of them.

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.

The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

There is a spiritual hunger in the world today - and it cannot be satisfied by better cars on longer credit terms.

Democracy requires civility, not a donation.

Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors the prepared mind.

In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.

The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.

Do not yield to misfortunes, but advance more boldly to meet them, as your fortune permits you.