Martin Svoboda

“A man has only one death. That death may be as weighty as Mount Tai, or it may be as light as a goose feather. It all depends upon the way he uses it.”

“If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away.”

“Money is a great barometer of people’s integrity. Money often reveals who we really are.”

“That flag represents something very powerful to the men and women who serve our country. So out of respect for them and those who fight to protect that flag and what that flag represents, I stand up and I put my hand over my heart.”

“Don't try to change the world, find something that you love
And do it every day
Do that for the rest of your life
And eventually, the world will change”

“We’re basically mediating our lives and our communication through these small, glowing rectangles. I think that that’s not really how people are made to interact.”

“Every human thought passes at the moment of its development into the external world, where it becomes an active being … Consequently, a person continuously inhabits the path he traverses in world space with a multitude of images representing child of his fantasies, desires, aspirations and passions.”

“God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.”

“You're only young once, my loved one, this is your chance”

“Effective people are not problem-minded; they're opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems.”

“Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life.”

“Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits.”

“Hold the standard. Ask for help. Do whatever’s necessary. But don’t cheat.”

“The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I’m a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know—what’ll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there’s nothing to be well adjusted to!”

“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

“When people are asleep, we must all become alarm clocks.”

“Telling the truth about the past helps cause justice in the present.”

“The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.”

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong… I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”