Answers Inside

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

--Marshall McLuhan

Risking Our Persons

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

--William James

Ass Smell

If a lot of dogs are on the beach, the first thing they do is smell each other's ass. The information that's gotten somehow makes pacifists out of all of them. I've thought, "If only we smelled each other's asses, there wouldn't be any war."

--Dustin Hoffman

Drunk God

Don't you know there ain't no devil.
There's just God when he's drunk.

--Tom Waits

Row Row Row

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

--Hunter S. Thompson

Devil's Boredom

It is wonderful how much good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.

--Helen Keller

That Takes Religion

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

--Steven Weinberg

Murder

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

--Napoleon Bonaparte

Short of Experts

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.

--Mark Twain

Sweet and Fitting

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori. *

--Wilfred Owen

* It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.

Paradox Time

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

--Bertrand Russell

Get It Right

You don't have to get it right the first time.

--Barbara Sher

Can't Laugh

Listen, if you can't laugh at death, you really have no right to be here.

--Robert Altman

A Little Hunger

If you want your children to have a peaceful life, let them suffer a little hunger and a little coldness.

--Chinese proverb

The Present

Do not live in the past, do not live in the future; concentrate the mind on the present moment.

--Buddha

Time Changes

They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

--Andy Warhol

Pause in the Action

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.

--Guillaume Apollinaire

Trust, Too

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust too.

--John Masefield

Half Awake

Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.

--William James

Cure the Soul (Anniversary Quote)

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

--Oscar Wilde

In Short

The soul is not a physical entity, but instead refers to everything about us that is not physical--our values, memories, identity, sense of humor. Since the soul represents the parts of the human being that are not physical, it cannot get sick, it cannot die, it cannot disappear. In short, the soul is immortal.

--Harold Kushner

Slightly Faster

History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.

--Kim Stanley Robinson

The Pass-Word

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy.

--Walt Whitman

So Little

It takes so little to make people happy. Just a touch, if we know how to give it, just a word fitly spoken, a slight readjustment of some bolt or pin or bearing in the delicate machinery of a soul.

--Frank Crane

Let America

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

--Langston Hughes

Do Continuously

Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.

--Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Rain Is Grace

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

--John Updike

What You Shall Do

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...

--Walt Whitman (preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass)

Celebration of All

Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists.

--Sogyal Rinpoche

Help Forget

Modern man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing. As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget.

--Ernest Becker

The Unexpected

A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.

--Mark Twain

Only One

There are 32 ways to write a story, but only one plot: Things are not as they seem.

--Jim Thompson

Looks Into You

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Central Acts

A reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not reacting in a naïve way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but is performing one of the central acts of literary understanding.

--Edward Mendelson

Two or Three

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

--Willa Cather

What Matters

Concepts do matter. The right thought arises from a true sensing within the heart of consciousness.

--Brian Donohue

Yawn Across The Country

The strange thing is that we have become sort of constitutional couch potatoes. The Congress just gave the President despotic powers and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to Dancing With the Stars. It's otherworldly....People clearly don't realize what a fundamental change it is about who we are as a country.

--Jonathan Turley (George Washington University professor and constitutional expert)

Tools Of Conquest

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own--for the children, and the children yet unborn.

--Rod Serling

Anything But

How can anybody look at the figure of Christ on the cross and think that's anything but a condemnation of torture? For the thinking person, it clearly is. But for the fundamentalist, that image creates anxiety about death and makes them cling to their hierarchical values even more.

--Amanda Marcotte

Who Knows God's Word?

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.

--Thomas Paine

Lack

It is not the lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Our Understanding

It is not our will that is being tested, but our understanding of reality.

--George Soros

A Triumph

All the analysis in the world doesn't allow the person to find out who he is and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and how he can make his life a triumph.

--Ernest Becker

Working Class Hero

They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV.
And you think you're so clever and classless and free.
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

--John Lennon

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.

--H. L. Mencken

Good Night, America

Good night, America, how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

--Steve Goodman

No Vice, No Virtue

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

--Barry Goldwater

Take That

And there you have it: from "compassionate conservative" to the abolition of common law, and all in a mere six years. Take that, Mao.

--Ellis Weiner

Fair Game

When a society throws away 900 years of common law, there's no telling what might happen. It's like using a tactical nuke. Suddenly, things that we, and our parents, and our grandparents were raised to consider too deviant to mention are now fair game.

--Lindsay Beyerstein

That Jewel

Is the relinquishment of the trial by jury and the liberty of the press necessary for your liberty? Will the abandonment of your most sacred rights tend to the security of your liberty? Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings--give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else!...Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.

--Patrick Henry

Oppressive and Lawless

Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. The judges of England developed the writ of habeas corpus largely to preserve these immunities from executive restraint.

--Justice Robert H. Jackson (Brown v. Allen, 1953)

Terrorism Is...

Terrorism is 10% bang and 90% an echo effect composed of media hysteria, political overkill and kneejerk executive action, usually retribution against some wider group treated as collectively responsible.

--Simon Jenkins

It's Like Your Dog

We are constantly trying to work out our relation to the other. It's like your dog meeting somebody else's dog. There is a growl, a sniff, a step forward, a potential rejection, or maybe an acceptance. That kind of thing is constantly taking place. Dogs do it very generously. As far as we human beings are concerned, obviously we are more subtle, but we are less generous because we have more "me." But still this process goes on constantly--we do that when we confront our world.

--Chogyam Trungpa

Kant Do

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.

--Robert Louis Stevenson

Like Anyone

I never like anyone till I've seen him at his worst.

--Ethel M. Dell

Something Which Consumes

We can only hope we will be able to cope with today's risk of a new totalitarianism, backed as it is by the world's last remaining ideology. As conscious democrats, we should freely resist the power of capital, which sees mankind as nothing more than something which consumes and produces.

--Gunter Grass

Void For Vagueness

The word spiritual is a space-holder for a variety of other concepts, which it intentionally hides. Like the words love and monogamy, it is void for vagueness, and is a loose thread leading to a cover-up.

--Eric Francis

Reality

Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.

--Henri Louis Bergson

That's All

To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an "ism." It is independence of mind--that's all.

--Martin Amis

Make Gentle

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

--Robert F. Kennedy

A Matter of Love

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

--Vladimir Nabokov

Let Us...

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

--Charles Dickens

The Lived Truth

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know...that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?

--Ernest Becker

Who Knows

Who knows but the world may end tonight?

--Robert Browning

Creation Better...

Creation is a better means of self-expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed.

--Vida D. Scudder

Beatitudes

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes.

--Kurt Vonnegut

Where? Who?

Where does a cloud come from? Where does it go?
Where was it before it appeared?
Where do people go when they die?
Where do they come from when they're born?
Who are you?

--Zen koan

Comes to America

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

--Sinclair Lewis

War Situation

Despite the best that has been done by everyone...the war situation has developed not necessarily to our advantage.

--Emperor Hirohito (radio broadcast announcing Japan's surrender, August 15, 1945)

Denial

In pretending Pluto is not a planet, we have yet another an example of a big denial trip associated with the darkness of the world. We are saying that the bottom line of reality (whatever is represented by the official planet most distant) is not Pluto: all matters of survival, life and death; sex; shared resources; and social and personal transformation; but rather, that it is Neptune: whatever you want it to be. It is about what you believe. This is a great, humorous metaphor for an era in history when the truth is whatever you want it to be.

--Eric Francis

Fetish

This is not the time to be weak and pacifist. But a gun or a bomb is always a fetish, a substitute for spiritual force, a sign of our weakness. This is the time to be strong in spirit and refuse to be enticed into literal battles in which the loser wins and the winner loses.

--Thomas Moore

Does Not Fit

The large corporation fits oddly into democratic theory and vision. Indeed, it does not fit.

--Charles Lindblom

Letting Go

I think most of the spiritual life is really a matter of relaxing--letting go, ceasing to cling, ceasing to insist on our own way, ceasing to tense ourselves up for this or against that.

--Beatrice Bruteau

Derives From...

We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all "inherent powers" must derive from that Constitution.

--U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor (August 17, 2006)

Error...Not

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

--William James

Best Argument

I always thought the best argument against the death penalty is God's casting out of Cain, rather than putting him to death.

--Sarah Steiner

Decay

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language...one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

--George Orwell

Need It

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

--Joan Didion

Rule It

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it.

--H.L. Mencken

Flying Blues

For thousands of years human beings dreamed of flying, but it took us less than a century to get sick of it.

--Walter Kirn

Ripe Fruit

Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.

--Henry David Thoreau

How Did They...?

But how did such people attain power in the first place? Maybe it's the result of our infantilized media culture, in which politicians, like celebrities, are judged by the way they look, not the reality of their achievements.

--Paul Krugman

In Wait

Even in the most civilized societies the demagogues are always in wait, ready and testing. They are indefatigable and we will never entirely prevail over them. And that is okay. But if we stop resisting them, they will prevail over us. And that is not okay.

---Milos Forman

Ultimate Test

The ultimate test of a man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.

--Senator Gaylord Nelson

I Accept

Is "I accept responsibility" the new "Your call is very important to us"? Probably.

--Seth Godin

Cosmic Joke

Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

--Martha Gellhorn

Cannot Sleep Forever

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.

--Thomas Jefferson

Choose Your Blastocyst

Can't we just use gay blastocysts? Or terrorist blastocysts? Or liberal blastocysts? I mean, we have DNA testing for that these days.

--Hoosier X

Better Solutions ???

Are there better solutions than violence? Of course there are. But they are all vastly more complicated, and furthermore they take time, hard thinking, and patience.

--Steve Dayton

Accountable

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

--John Stuart Mill

Belief Divides

We have seen that ceremonies are not religion, that going to a temple is not religion, and that belief is not religion. Belief divides people.

--Jiddu Krishnamurti

Patience

Patience. A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.

--Ambrose Bierce

Related To All Things

You may call this thought by whatever fancy words you wish--psychology, theology, sociology, or philosophy--but you must think of Mother Earth as a living being. Think of your fellow men and women as holy people who were put here by the Great Spirit. Think of being related to all things.

--Ed McGaa

Wicked

Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed. Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united--and they can only be united against other people.

--Leo Strauss

All Men

It is not too early, it is never too early, for the nation steadfastly to follow its great constitutional traditions, none older or more universally protective against unbridled power than due process of law in the trial and punishment of men, that is, of all men, whether citizens, aliens, alien enemies or enemy belligerents.

--Supreme Court Justice Wiley B. Rutledge (1947)

How Will I Be...?

We often wonder: "How will I be when I die?" The answer to that is that whatever state of mind we are in now, whatever kind of person we are now: that's what we will be like at the moment of death, if we do not change....You can see the demigod realm being acted out every day perhaps in the intrigue and rivalry of Wall Street, or in the seething corridors of Washington and Whitehall. And the hungry ghost realms? They exist wherever people, though immensely rich, are never satisfied, craving to take over this company or that one, or endlessly playing out their greed in court cases. Switch on any television channel and you have entered immediately the world of demigods and hungry ghosts.

--Sogyal Rinpoche

Gentle People

Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.

--Garrison Keillor

Called To Account

A person will be called to account on Judgment Day for every permissible thing he might have enjoyed but did not.

--The Talmud

Make Yourself

You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.

--Anne-Wilson Schaef

The Master

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

--Martin Heidegger