The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any a...
Arthur Schlesinger admits that JFK "succumbed to the fake omniscience of insiders". Prolonged immersion in the self-contained, self-justifying world of clandestinity and deception erodes the reality principle.
Groves, with his eye for sizing up people who could get things done, saw the deep ambition Oppenheimer covered with his surface charm.
Money is the root of all goodness. To talk disparagingly about money is the privilege of those who have money. There are also those people who state matter-of-factly that "money isn't everything". This statement is also true, but only so long as one ...
Worshipping the Lord means giving Him the place that he must have; worshipping the Lord means stating, believing - not only by our words - that He alone truly guides our lives; worshipping the Lord means that we are convinced before Him that He is th...
My emotional state is determined by where my attention goes.
Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern man is living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German sayin...
States of the atmosphere pass into us as water through the meshes of a sieve, and storms occur in us before they break upon the world without, creating restless sensations. ("Absolute Evil")
...he had read von Lambert's book on terrorism, there were two pages devoted to the Arab resistance movement, von Lambert refused to call them terrorists, which didn't preclude, and he had emphasized this, that nonterrorists were also capable of atro...
There's a strange lack of knowledge about the role of drag queens in our culture. I attribute this to the appalling state of our country's educational system. Others might blame an utter lack of interest. Who am I to judge?
Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole ...
By keeping the mind in the present, unless you deliberately want to contemplate the past or future, it’s possible to firmly face life without fear. Then, no thoughts of past failures or future problems will exist in the mind, and a truly positive m...
Joy, like love, is an impenetrable, God-given state of being. The distinctions between joy and happiness and love and affection are important ones under the notion that happiness is an 'iffy' emotion, a highly dependent feeling both aroused and destr...
Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if ...
Since you act as though God is dead, I wanted to join you in the mourning." The reply of Martin Luther's wife, in full funeral regalia, in trying to illustrate the folly of his depressed state.
I’ve never been on a bike,” I say. “I mean, I’ve been on a bike but not a motorcycle.” “And why is that?” he asks. “Bugs. They get in your mouth, right? That’s just gross.” Chris makes a face. “If you ride around with your mouth...
Environmental degradation is an iatrogenic disease induced by economic physicians who treat the basic malady of unlimited wants by prescribing unlimited growth.... Yet one certainly does not cure a treatment-induced disease by increasing the treatmen...
I don’t know how it happened. Nobody does. There are only theories, empty rhetoric and doomsday prophecies. None of them are right, but none of them are completely wrong, either. They all have a grain of truth. All I know is where I was and what I ...
He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity o...
The way we experience the pilgrimage is a reflection of our inner state,’ the imam said. ‘To some of us it will be a strenuous trial, whereas to others every step of the way is a joy, despite the privations and discomfort.
Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state ... Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less tho...
