Quotes about the trip

page 21

Nobel lecture (1978)

Harvard University address (1978)

Sermons

[Rigopoulos, Antonio, The Life And Teachings Of Sai Baba Of Shirdi: The Conflicting Origins, Impacts, and Futures of the Community College, http://books.google.com/books?id=TNohSoS0CzUC&pg=PA43, 1993, SUNY Press, 978-0-7914-1267-1, 43–]
Sources

2016, State of the Union address (January 2016)

"Mosh"
2000s, Encore (2004)

2015, Young African Leaders Initiative Presidential Summit Town Hall speech (August 2015)

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 541.

Eryximachus to Phaedrus, p. 43
L'Âme et la danse (1921)

Tractatus de indulgentiis per Doctorem Martinum ordinis s. Augustini Wittenbergae editus., or, A Treatise on Indulgences Published by Doctor Martin of the Order of St. Augustine in Wittenberg. To Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz (31 October 1517) Luther's "forgotten" treatise was found in the Mainz archives “among the papers making up the correspondence between Archbishop Albrecht and the Mainz University faculty in December 1517” and published by F. Herrmann in the Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte (ZKG) in 1907, vol. 28, pp. 370-373. Catholic Luther scholar Jared Wicks S. J. believes this early treatise to be of considerable historical significance: "This document is the short treatise sketching a tentative theology of indulgences which Luther sent to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz and Magdeburg on that fateful October 31, 1517. The other two documents of Luther's intervention are well known. First, there was the respectful, though urgent letter to the Archbishop in which Luther related the misunderstandings being spread by Tetzel's preaching and in which he begged the Archbishop to issue new instructions which would bring Tetzel under control. Secondly, there was the list of Latin theses on the doctrine and practice of indulgences which Luther intended to use as the basis of a theological discussion of the many vexed questions in this area. The third document sent to Albrecht, Luther's treatise, has not received the attention it deserves from historians and theologians studying the beginning of the Reformation. This is most regrettable, since the treatise depicts in orderly and succinct fashion Luther's understanding of indulgences in 1517 and reveals his conception of their limited role in Christian living. The treatise gives us the theological standpoint on which Luther based his intervention, and it shows in miniature the rich Augustinian spirituality of penance and progress that he had forged in his early works. ...[T]he great tragedy of 1517 was that the barbed [95] theses spread over Germany in a matter of weeks, and this penetrating little treatise fell into dusty oblivion."
Martin Luther's Treatise on Indulgences, Theological Studies 28 (1967), pp. 481-482, 518. http://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=%22forgotten+document+in+luther%27s%22&btnG=#hl=en&q=%22forgotten%20document%20in%20luther%27s%22&um=1&bpcl=35466521&psj=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=pw&psj=1&ei=Y-6JUJ-mL4eo8gShuYDIBQ&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=e5b835ba41618e18&biw=1232&bih=702 http://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=%22forgotten+document+in+luther%27s%22&btnG=#hl=en&q=%22forgotten+document+in+luther%27s%22&um=1&bpcl=35466521&psj=1&ie=UTF-8&tbo=u&tbm=bks&source=og&sa=N&tab=wp&psj=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=4fa257fccf8e3a83&biw=1232&bih=702

Fiction, The Other Gods (1921)

Newton to Bentley, 10 December 1692 (first letter), The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 3:233. Referenced on p. 383 of Snobelen SD: " The Theology of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica: A Preliminary Survey https://isaacnewtonstheology.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/theology-of-the-principia.pdf," pp. 377–412, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, Volume 52, Issue 4 (Jan 2010)
Context: When I wrote my treatise about our System, I had an eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose. But if I have done the public any service this way, 'tis due to nothing but industry and a patient thought.

1950s, The Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955)
Context: We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 243 (1963)
Context: I haven't made my point yet, which is that it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way — otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contrary the Christian danger.

Black Boy (1945)

Breakfast of Champions (1973)
Context: I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.
As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their madeup tales.
And so on.
Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

2016, DNC Address (July 2016)
Context: America is already great. America is already strong. And I promise you, our strength, our greatness, does not depend on Donald Trump. In fact, it doesn’t depend on any one person. And that, in the end, may be the biggest difference in this election — the meaning of our democracy.
Ronald Reagan called America “a shining city on a hill.” Donald Trump calls it “a divided crime scene” that only he can fix. It doesn’t matter to him that illegal immigration and the crime rate are as low as they’ve been in decades — (applause) — because he’s not actually offering any real solutions to those issues. He’s just offering slogans, and he’s offering fear. He’s betting that if he scares enough people, he might score just enough votes to win this election.
And that's another bet that Donald Trump will lose. And the reason he'll lose it is because he’s selling the American people short. We're not a fragile people. We're not a frightful people. Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don’t look to be ruled. Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that We the People, can form a more perfect union.
That's who we are. That’s our birthright — the capacity to shape our own destiny.

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 5 : The Delphic Oracle as Therapist, p. 99
Context: The self is made up, on its growing edge, of the models, forms, metaphors, myths, and all other kinds of psychic content which give it direction in its self-creation. This is a process that goes on continuously. As Kierkegaard well said, the self is only that which it is in the process of becoming. Despite the obvious determinism in human life — especially in the physical aspect of ones self in such simple things as color of eyes, height relative length of life, and so on — there is also, clearly, this element of self-directing, self-forming. Thinking and self-creating are inseparable. When we become aware of all the fantasies in which we see ourselves in the future, pilot ourselves this way or that, this becomes obvious.

Letter to his daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth (2 September 1905)
1900s
Context: It is enough to give any one a sense of sardonic amusement to see the way in which the people generally, not only in my own country but elsewhere, gauge the work purely by the fact that it succeeded. If I had not brought about peace I should have been laughed at and condemned. Now I am over-praised. I am credited with being extremely longheaded, etc. As a matter of fact I took the position I finally did not of my own volition but because events so shaped themselves that I would have felt as if I was flinch- ing from a plain duty if I had acted otherwise. … Neither Government would consent to meet where the other wished and the Japanese would not consent to meet at The Hague, which was the place I desired. The result was that they had to meet in this country, and this necessarily threw me into a position of prominence which I had not sought, and indeed which I had sought to avoid — though I feel now that unless they had met here they never would have made peace.

p 6
The Undiscovered Self (1958)
Context: Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean. This mean is quite valid though it need not necessarily occur in reality. Despite this it figures in the theory as an unassailable fundamental fact. … If, for instance, I determine the weight of each stone in a bed of pebbles and get an average weight of 145 grams, this tells me very little about the real nature of the pebbles. Anyone who thought, on the basis of these findings, that he could pick up a pebbles of 145 grams at the first try would be in for a serious disappointment. Indeed, it might well happen that however long he searched he would not find a single pebble weighing exactly 145 grams. The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way.

2016, DNC Address (July 2016)
Context: America has changed over the years. But these values that my grandparents taught me — they haven’t gone anywhere. They’re as strong as ever, still cherished by people of every party, every race, every faith. They live on in each of us. What makes us American, what makes us patriots is what’s in here. That’s what matters. … And that’s why we can take the food and music and holidays and styles of other countries, and blend it into something uniquely our own. That’s why we can attract strivers and entrepreneurs from around the globe to build new factories and create new industries here. That’s why our military can look the way it does — every shade of humanity, forged into common service. That’s why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.
That is America. That is America. Those bonds of affection; that common creed. We don’t fear the future; we shape it. We embrace it, as one people, stronger together than we are on our own.

2016, Remarks to the People of Cuba (March 2016)
Context: The ideals that are the starting point for every revolution -- America’s revolution, Cuba’s revolution, the liberation movements around the world -- those ideals find their truest expression, I believe, in democracy. Not because American democracy is perfect, but precisely because we’re not. And we -- like every country -- need the space that democracy gives us to change. It gives individuals the capacity to be catalysts to think in new ways, and to reimagine how our society should be, and to make them better.

Junkie (1953)
Context: When you give up junk, you give up a way of life. I have seen junkies kick and hit the lush and wind up dead in a few years. Suicide is frequent among ex-junkies. Why does a junky quit junk of his own will? You never know the answer to that question. No conscious tabulation of the disadvantages and horrors of junk gives you the emotional drive to kick. The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before.

As told to H.M. Brackenridge, Jackson's secretary, in 1821; quoted by James Parton, The Life of Andrew Jackson (1860), vol. II, ch. XXVI (Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1888), page 354. Parton cites his source as H.M. Brackenridge, Letters, page 8.
1820s
Context: Do they think that I am such a damned fool as to think myself fit for President of the United States? No, sir; I know what I am fit for. I can command a body of men in a rough way, but I am not fit to be President.

"How to Love God" (12 September 1954) http://www.avatarmeherbaba.org/erics/lovegod.html <!-- Also in The Path of Love (1986) -->
General sources
Context: When a person tells others “Be good”, he conveys to his hearers the feeling that he is good and they are not. When he says “Be brave, honest and pure”, he conveys to his hearers the feeling that the speaker himself is all that, while they are cowards, dishonest and unclean.
To love God in the most practical way is to love our fellow beings. If we feel for others in the same way as we feel for our own dear ones, we love God.
If, instead of seeing faults in others we look within ourselves we are loving God.

"The End and the Beginning"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The End and the Beginning (1993)
Context: Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Source: Education of a Wandering Man (1989), Ch. 1
Context: The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume that there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.
Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of any education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline.
Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That's absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places. I read on buses, trains, and planes. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long?

2015, Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney (June 2015)
Context: For too long, we’ve been blind to the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation. Sporadically, our eyes are open: When eight of our brothers and sisters are cut down in a church basement, 12 in a movie theater, 26 in an elementary school. But I hope we also see the 30 precious lives cut short by gun violence in this country every single day; the countless more whose lives are forever changed -- the survivors crippled, the children traumatized and fearful every day as they walk to school, the husband who will never feel his wife’s warm touch, the entire communities whose grief overflows every time they have to watch what happened to them happen to some other place. The vast majority of Americans -- the majority of gun owners -- want to do something about this. We see that now. And I'm convinced that by acknowledging the pain and loss of others, even as we respect the traditions and ways of life that make up this beloved country -- by making the moral choice to change, we express God’s grace.

Session 884, Page 138
Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Volume One (1986)
Context: Value fulfillment itself is most difficult to describe, for it combines the nature of a loving presence - a presence with the innate knowledge of its own divine complexity - with a creative ability of infinite proportions that seeks to bring to fulfillment even the slightest, most distant portion of its own inverted complexity. Translated into simpler terms, each portion of energy is endowed with an inbuilt reach of creativity that seeks to fulfill its own potentials in all possible variations - and in such a way that such a development also furthers the creative potentials of each other portion of reality.

"The World": Love (1943), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
Rescue (1945)
Context: Love means to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills —
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: Again, every citizen should be trained sedulously by every activity at our command to realize his duty to the nation. In France at this moment the workingmen who are not at the front are spending all their energies with the single thought of helping their brethren at the front by what they do in the munition plant, on the railroads, in the factories. It is a shocking, a lamentable thing that many of the trade-unions of England have taken a directly opposite view. I am not concerned with whether it be true, as they assert, that their employers are trying to exploit them, or, as these employers assert, that the labor men are trying to gain profit for those who stay at home at the cost of their brethren who fight in the trenches. The thing for us Americans to realize is that we must do our best to prevent similar conditions from growing up here. Business men, professional men, and wage workers alike must understand that there should be no question of their enjoying any rights whatsoever unless in the fullest way they recognize and live up to the duties that go with those rights. This is just as true of the corporation as of the trade-union, and if either corporation or trade-union fails heartily to acknowledge this truth, then its activities are necessarily anti-social and detrimental to the welfare of the body politic as a whole. In war time, when the welfare of the nation is at stake, it should be accepted as axiomatic that the employer is to make no profit out of the war save that which is necessary to the efficient running of the business and to the living expenses of himself and family, and that the wageworker is to treat his wage from exactly the same standpoint and is to see to it that the labor organization to which he belongs is, in all its activities, subordinated to the service of the nation.

Source: Prometheus Bound, lines 510–524, as translated by R. Potter (1860)

The Tonight Show, 11 September 2006
Context: In a world where there is enlightenment, intelligence, kindness, awareness of others' needs and others' well-being, there is no terrorism. And in a world of viciousness and narrow-mindedness and only one way, there will be terrorism. Our challenge, in our country, is to find a way to disagree amongst ourselves without being so awful about it.

Go Rin No Sho (1645)
Context: The Way is shown in five books concerning different aspects. These are Ground, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void.
The body of the Way of strategy from the viewpoint of my Ichi school is explained in the Ground book. It is difficult to realise the true Way just through sword-fencing. Know the smallest things and the biggest things, the shallowest things and the deepest things. As if it were a straight road mapped out on the ground, the first book is called the Ground book.

From "A 39 News Interview in Houston" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXTL6EqHqkc

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Ground Book
Context: There is timing in the whole life of the warrior, in his thriving and declining, in his harmony and discord. Similarly, there is timing in the Way of the merchant, in the rise and fall of capital. All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this. In strategy there are various timing considerations. From the outset you must know the applicable timing and the inapplicable timing, and from among the large and small things and the fast and slow timings find the relevant timing, first seeing the distance timing and the background timing. This is the main thing in strategy. It is especially important to know the background timing, otherwise your strategy will become uncertain.

The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Detroit, Michigan (12 April 1964)
Context: And 1964 looks like it might be the year of the ballot or the bullet. Why does it look like it might be the year of the ballot or the bullet? Because Negroes have listened to the trickery, and the lies, and the false promises of the white man now for too long. And they’re fed up. They’ve become disenchanted. They’ve become disillusioned. They’ve become dissatisfied, and all of this has built up frustrations in the black community that makes the black community throughout today more explosive than all of the atomic bombs the Russians can ever invent. Whenever you got a racial powder keg sitting in your lap, you’re in more trouble than if you had an atomic powder keg sitting in your lap. When a racial powder keg goes off, it doesn’t care who it knocks out the way. Understand this, it’s dangerous.

Playboy interview (1980)
Context: It takes time to get rid of all this garbage that I've been carrying around that was influencing the way I thought and the way I lived. It had a lot to do with Yoko, showing me that I was still possessed. I left physically when I fell in love with Yoko, but mentally it took the last ten years of struggling. I learned everything from her. … It is a teacher-pupil relationship. That's what people don't understand. She's the teacher and I'm the pupil. I'm the famous one, the one who's supposed to know everything, but she's my teacher. She's taught me everything I fucking know. She's my Don Juan … a Don Juan doesn't have a following. A Don Juan isn't in the newspaper and doesn't have disciples and doesn't proselytize.

Prologue
Junkie (1953)

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)
Context: I set an example. That's all anyone can do. I'm sorry the cowgirls didn't pay better attention, but I couldn't force them to notice me. I've lived most of my entire adult life outside the law, and never have I compromised with authority. But neither have I gone out and picked fights with authority. That's stupid. They're waiting for that; they invite it; it helps keep them powerful. Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted and avoided. And it's fairly easy to do all three. If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid — but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.

"Gubbinal"
Harmonium (1923)

Salon interview (1997)
Context: I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.

(Omitted from the original 1980 Playboy interview). Complete text of the interview in, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 2000, David Sheff, G. Barry Golson, St. Martin's Griffin; , pp. 112-113. http://books.google.com/books?id=HL7X-YyrINUC&pg=PA112&dq=%22nor+do+i+think+we+came+from+monkeys%22&hl=en&ei=ob0STqL7H8T_sQKnjtjUDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22nor%20do%20i%20think%20we%20came%20from%20monkeys%22&f=false [Originally published in October 1981 as The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yōko Ono]. http://books.google.com/books?id=UVYIAQAAMAAJ&q=%22nor+do+i+think+we+came+from+monkeys%22&dq=%22nor+do+i+think+we+came+from+monkeys%22&hl=en&ei=XsYSTpvQAaXksQLFi8WaCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAQ.Complete fragment available at EvolutionNews.org http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/john_lennon_darwin_doubter048051.html.
Playboy interview (1980)
Context: Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the way... That's another piece of garbage. What the hell's it based on? We couldn't've come from anything--fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don't believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren't monkeys changing into men now? It's absolute garbage. It's absolutely irrational garbage, as mad as the ones who believe the world was made only four thousand years ago, the fundamentalists.
That and the monkey thing are both as insane as the other. I’ve nothing to base it on; it’s only a gut feeling. They always draw that progression-these apes standing up suddenly. The early men are always drawn like apes, right? Because that fits in the theory we have been living with since Darwin. I don't buy that monkey business. [Singing] "Too much monkey business..." [Laughing] I don' t buy it. I've got no basis for it and no theory to offer, I just don't buy it. Something other than that. Something simpler. I don't buy I've got no basis for it and no theory to offer, I just don't buy it. Something other than that. Something simpler. I don't buy anything other than "It always was and ever shall be." I can't conceive of anything less or more. The other theories change all the time. They set up these idols and then they knock them down. It keeps all the old professors happy in the university. It gives them something to do. I don't know if there's any harm in it except they ram it down everybody's throat. Everything they told me as a kid has already been disproved by the same type of "experts" who made them up in the first place.

Barack Obama: "Address to the Ghanaian Parliament in Accra, Ghana," July 11, 2009. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=86395&st=&st1=
2009
Context: As I said in Cairo, each nation gives life to democracy in its own way and in line with its own traditions. But history offers a clear verdict: Governments that respect the will of their own people, that govern by consent, and not coercion, are more prosperous, they are more stable, and more successful than governments that do not. This is about more than just holding elections; it's also about what happens between elections. Repression can take many forms, and too many nations, even those that have elections, are plagued by problems that condemn their people to poverty. And no country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or if police can be bought off by drug traffickers. No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. This—that is not democracy; that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. And now is the time for that style of governance to end. In the 21st century, capable, reliable, and transparent institutions are the key to success: strong Parliaments; honest police forces; independent judges; an independent press; a vibrant private sector; a civil society. Those are the things that give life to democracy, because that is what matters in people's everyday lives.

In Search of the Miraculous (1949), Ch. 10. p. 203
Context: It is impossible to recognize a wrong way without knowing the right way. This means that it is no use troubling oneself how to recognize a wrong way. One must think of how to find the right way.

1979
Context: On theory: "I don’t know any theory. Knowing the theory does not mean anything. If we theoretically know what a human being is, but someone has never seen one, or if you have never had a relationship with a human being, you cannot know anything about human beings! I think that the best way to gain knowledge is through gaining experience and through connections... Look, if I approach an instrument theoretically, it will give me a theory, so therefore this will make cold music".

Oui interview (1979)
Context: The cool-person syndrome is peculiarly American. Part of that has to do with the way the educational business is run in the U. S. It’s not based on how much you can teach your child: it’s based on how much money the suppliers of basic materials can make off your child. Somewhere along the line most people pick up the desire to be a cool person, which is just another way to make them buy things. Once you’ve decided that you need to be a cool person, it makes you a possible victim of anyone whose products are the equivalent of bottled smoke. Somebody tells you to buy this particularly useless item and you’ll be a cool person. No matter how stupid it seems, you have to buy it. Pet Rocks. Pringle’s potato chips. whatever it is — the newest, the latest. Since the cool-person thing is something you learn in school, and since the school business is pretty suspicious and definitely tied up with the government, it makes you wonder whether or not the desire to be cool is part of a government plot to make you buy stupid things.

Letter to August Derleth (21 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 220
Non-Fiction, Letters, to August Derleth
Context: Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat—especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral. Yet I can assure you that this point of view is joined to one of the plainest, naivest, and most unobtrusively old-fashioned of personalities—a retiring old hermit and ascetic who does not even know what your contemporary round of activities and "parties" is like, and who during the coming winter will probably not address two consecutive sentences to any living person—tradesmen apart—save a pair of elderly aunts! Some people—a very few, perhaps—are naturally cosmic in outlook, just as others are naturally 'of and for the earth'. I am myself less exclusively cosmic than Klarkash-Ton and Wandrei... I begin with the individual and the soil and think outward—appreciating the sensation of spatial and temporal liberation only when I can scale it against the known terrestrial scene. They, on the other hand, are able to think of wholly non-human abysses of ultimate space—without reference-points—as realities neither irrelevant nor less significant than immediate human life. With me, the very quality of being cosmically sensitive breeds an exaggerated attachment to the familiar and the immediate—Old Providence, the woods and hills, the ancient ways and thoughts of New England—whilst with them it seems to have the opposite effect of alienating them from immediate anchorages. They despise the immediate as trivial; I know that it is trivial, but cherish rather than despise it—because everything, including infinity itself, is trivial. In reality I am the profoundest cynic of them all, for I recognize no absolute values whatever.

Go Rin No Sho (1645), Introduction
Context: When I reached thirty I looked back on my past. The previous victories were not due to my having mastered strategy. Perhaps it was natural ability, or the order of heaven, or that other schools' strategy was inferior. After that I studied morning and evening searching for the principle, and came to realise the Way of strategy when I was fifty.
Since then I have lived without following any particular Way. Thus with the virtue of strategy I practise many arts and abilities — all things with no teacher. To write this book I did not use the law of Buddha or the teachings of Confucius, neither old war chronicles nor books on martial tactics. I take up my brush to explain the true spirit of this Ichi school as it is mirrored in the Way of heaven and Kwannon. The time is the night of the tenth day of the tenth month, at the hour of the tiger.

Source: The Story of Civilization (1935–1975), I - Our Oriental Heritage (1935), Ch. III : The Political Elements of Civilization, p. 21
Context: If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous. In the simplest societies there is hardly any government. Primitive hunters tend to accept regulation only when they join the hunting pack and prepare for action. The Bushmen usually live in solitary families; the Pygmies of Africa and the simplest natives of Australia admit only temporarily of political organization, and then scatter away to their family groups; the Tasmanians had no chiefs, no laws, no regular government; the Veddahs of Ceylon formed small circles according to family relationship, but had no government; the Kubus of Sumatra "live without men in authority" every family governing itself; the Fuegians are seldom more than twelve together; the Tungus associate sparingly in groups of ten tents or so; the Australian "horde" is seldom larger than sixty souls. In such cases association and cooperation are for special purposes, like hunting; they do not rise to any permanent political order.

Salon interview (1997)
Context: I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.

Aphorism (1937), p. 38
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
Context: Body and soul are not two different things, but only two different ways of perceiving the same thing. Similarly, physics and psychology are only different attempts to link our experiences together by way of systematic thought.

KSCA interview (1996)
Context: There is no set sort of rules, or no set sort of formula to the way we work in the studio... so it's difficult to know... what we'll move on to next. We don't like to say, "Never, no we'd never do this"... But, we... like the setup as far as there's only three people in the studio... because the work is very personal, very intimate, very emotional... and that is very important to the album.

The Knowledge of God and the Service of God (1939), p. 31

2014, Review of Signals Intelligence Speech (June 2014)
Context: Those values make us who we are. And because of the strength of our own democracy, we should not shy away from high expectations. For more than two centuries, our Constitution has weathered every type of change because we have been willing to defend it, and because we have been willing to question the actions that have been taken in its defense. Today is no different. I believe we can meet high expectations. Together, let us chart a way forward that secures the life of our nation while preserving the liberties that make our nation worth fighting for.

Misattributed
Source: Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of American Statesmen (1898), p. 370 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435065322687?urlappend=%3Bseq=458: "If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing—court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie." Other versions of the saying were repeated in several of Hubbard's later writings.

The Dub Room Special (1982).
Context: I think that if a person doesn't feel cynical then they're out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization — you can't just swallow it whole.

Sec. 84
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: Beating is the worst, and therefore the last means to be us'd in the correction of children, and that only in the cases of extremity, after all gently ways have been try'd, and proved unsuccessful; which, if well observ'd, there will very seldom be any need of blows.

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics
Context: A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life which he is able to succor, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. To him life as such is sacred. He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he walks. If he works by lamplight on a summer evening, he prefers to keep the window shut and to breathe stifling air, rather than to see insect after insect fall on his table with singed and sinking wings.
If he goes out in to the street after a rainstorm and sees a worm which has strayed there, he reflects that it will certainly dry up in the sunshine, if it does not quickly regain the damp soil into which it can creep, and so he helps it back from the deadly paving stones into the lush grass. Should he pass by an insect which has fallen into a pool, he spares the time to reach it a leaf or stalk on which it may clamber and save itself.

Source: Detective Story (2008), p. 91.
Context: There was truth in Diaz’s logic, yes: our line of work is like that. Once you have started, the only way back is to go forward.

2013, Commencement Address at Ohio State University (May 2013)
Context: You were born as freedom forced its way through a wall in Berlin, and tore down an Iron Curtain across Europe. You were educated in an era of instant information that put the world’s accumulated knowledge at your fingertips. And you came of age as terror touched our shores; an historic recession spread across the nation; and a new generation signed up to go to war. 
You have been tested and tempered by events that your parents and I never imagined we’d see when we sat where you sit. And yet, despite all this, or more likely because of it, yours has become a generation possessed with that most American of ideas – that people who love their country can change it. For all the turmoil; for all the times you have been let down, or frustrated at the hand you’ve been dealt; what I have seen from your generation are perennial and quintessentially American values. Altruism. Empathy. Tolerance. Community. And a deep sense of service that makes me optimistic for our future.

2012, Yangon University Speech (November 2012)
Context: And to protect the freedom of all the voters, those in power must accept constraints. That's what our American system is designed to do. Now, America may have the strongest military in the world, but it must submit to civilian control. I, as the President of the United States, make determinations that the military then carries out, not the other way around. As President and Commander-In-Chief, I have that responsibility because I'm accountable to the people.

On the 60's flower children
Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)
Context: It's sort of like a mockery in a way of reality because they think everything is smiles and sweetness and flowers when there is something bitter to taste. And to pretend there isn't is foolish. I mean the ones that wonder around and know, at the same time, and yet wear flowers, and they deserve to wear flowers. And they've earned their smile... you can tell by people's eyes.

The Point of View of My Work as an Author (1848, 1851, 1859)<!-- Lowrie 1939, 1962 --> p. 153-155
1840s
Context: I have never fought in such a way as to say: I am the true Christian, others are not Christians. No, my contention has been this: I know what Christianity is, my imperfection as a Christian I myself fully recognize — but I know what Christianity is. And to get this properly recognized must be, I should think, to every man’s interest, whether he be a Christian or not, whether his intention is to accept Christianity or to reject it. But I have attacked no one as not being a Christian, I have condemned no one. Indeed, the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, who sets the problem ‘about becoming a Christian’, does exactly the opposite: he denies that he is a Christian and concedes this claim to the others — the remotest possible remove, surely, from condemning others! And I myself have from the first clearly asserted, again and again repeated, that I am ‘without authority’. My tactics were, by God’s aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is — even though not one single person should be induced to enter into it, and though I myself might have to give up being a Christian (in which case I should have felt obliged to make open admission of the fact). On the other hand, my tactics were these: instead of giving the impression, in however small a degree, that there are such difficulties about Christianity that an apology for it is needed if men are to be persuaded to enter into it, rather to represent it as a thing so infinitely lofty, as in truth it is, that the apology belongs in another place, is required, that is to say, of us for the fact that we venture to call ourselves Christians, or it transforms itself into a contrite confession that we have God to thank if we merely assume to regard ourselves as a Christian. But neither must this ever be forgotten: Christianity is just as lenient as it is austere, just as lenient, that is to say, infinitely lenient. When the infinite requirement is heard and upheld, heard and upheld in all its infinitude, then grace is offered, or rather grace offers itself, and to it the individual, each for himself, as I also do, can flee for refuge.

Man in the Modern Age (1933)
Context: Man, if he is to remain man, must advance by way of consciousness. There is no road leading backward.... We can no longer veil reality from ourselves by renouncing self-consciousness without simultaneously excluding ourselves from the historical course of human existence. <!-- p. 143

Yo-Yo Boing! (Spanglish novel, 1998)
Context: If I respected languages like you do, I wouldn't write at all. El muro de Berlín fue derribado. Why can't I do the same? Desde la torre de Babel, las lenguas han sido siempre una forma de divorciarnos del resto de la humanidad. Poetry must find ways of breaking distance. I'm not reducing my audience. On the contrary, I'm going to have a bigger audience with the common markets — in Europe — in America. And besides, all languages are dialects that are made to break new grounds. I feel like Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio, and I even feel like Garcilaso forging a new language. Saludo al nuevo siglo, el siglo del nuevo lenguaje de América, y le digo adiós a la retórica separatista y a los atavismos.

Speech to a joint session of the US Congress (12 March 1947), outlining what became known as The Truman Doctrine
Context: At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

Just Say No (1986)
Context: As a mother, I've always thought of September as a special month, a time when we bundled our children off to school, to the warmth of an environment in which they could fulfill the promise and hope in those restless minds. But so much has happened over these last years, so much to shake the foundations of all that we know and all that we believe in. Today there's a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country, and no one is safe from it — not you, not me, and certainly not our children, because this epidemic has their names written on it. Many of you may be thinking: "Well, drugs don't concern me." But it does concern you. It concerns us all because of the way it tears at our lives and because it's aimed at destroying the brightness and life of the sons and daughters of the United States.

Remarks by the President at a Drop-By of 21st Century Policing Event https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/07/22/remarks-president-drop-21st-century-policing-event (22 July 2016). Quoted in: "Grinning Obama JOKES during statement on Munich carnage as he shifts gears to say he'll miss daughter Malia when she leaves the nest for college" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3703975/Grinning-Obama-JOKES-Munich-carnage-press-conference-shifts-gears-talk-daughter-Malia-leaving-nest-college.html by David Martosko, Daily Mail (22 July 2016).
2016
Context: Our hearts go out to those who may have been injured. It’s still an active situation. And Germany is one of our closest allies, so we are going to pledge all the support that they may need in dealing with these circumstances. It's a good reminder of something that I've said over the last couple of weeks, which is our way of life -- our freedoms, our ability to go about our business every day, raising our kids and seeing them grow up and graduate from high school -- and now about to leave their dad -- (laughter) -- I'm sorry, I'm getting a little too personal -- getting a little too personal there -- (laughter) -- that depends on law enforcement. It depends on the men and women in uniform every single day who are, under some of the most adverse circumstances imaginable at times, making sure to keep us safe.

2014, Queensland University Address (November 2014)
Context: As we develop, as we focus on our econ, we cannot forget the need to lead on the global fight against climate change. [... ] Here in the Asia Pacific, nobody has more at stake when it comes to thinking about and then acting on climate change. Here, a climate that increases in temperature will mean more extreme and frequent storms, more flooding, rising seas that submerge Pacific islands. Here in Australia, it means longer droughts, more wildfires. The incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threated. Worldwide, this past summer was the hottest on record. No nation is immune, and every nation has a responsibility to do its part. [... ] We are mindful of the great work that still has to be done on this issue. But let me say, particularly again to the young people here: Combating climate change cannot be the work of governments alone. Citizens, especially the next generation, you have to keep raising your voices, because you deserve to live your lives in a world that is cleaner and that is healthier and that is sustainable. But that is not going to happen unless you are heard. It is in the nature of things, it is in the nature of the world that those of us who start getting gray hair are a little set in our ways, that interests are entrenched -- not because people are bad people, it’s just that’s how we’ve been doing things. And we make investments, and companies start depending on certain energy sources, and change is uncomfortable and difficult. And that’s why it’s so important for the next generation to be able to step and say, no, it doesn’t have to be this way. You have the power to imagine a new future in a way that some of the older folks don’t always have.

Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian
Context: Instead of this, I tell
what I hope will pass as truth.
A blunt thing, not lovely.
The truth is seldom welcome,
especially at dinner,
though I am good at what I do.
My trade is courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.

Mount Analogue (1952)

Book II, 1106b.28
Nicomachean Ethics

Oui interview (1979)
Context: There isn’t anything weird about my music. Weird is a skeleton in the closet, wearing a rubber mask with warts all over its nose, and all that kind of shit. That’s not what I do. The thing that makes my music unusual is that people only hear one kind of music all the time over the radio. It’s wallpaper to their lives. Audile wallpaper. There’s one acceptable beat and there are three acceptable chord progressions. There are five acceptable words: baby, love, tears, yat yat. Just because I don’t deal in those terms doesn’t mean I’m weird. So tell these people: I ain’t weird; I’m rational. I’m a person who can choose to write stuff like that, or choose to write stuff that includes all the notes on the piano played at once, followed by a cement truck driving over the piano, followed by a small atomic explosion. Nothing weird about that as long as you do it in a meaningful way.

The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937)
Context: Finally, it was time for him to get up on his feet, and he did so, all ready to bust out with lightning and denunciations. But before he started he looked over the judge and jury for a moment, such being his custom. And he noticed the glitter in their eyes was twice as strong as before, and they all leaned forward. Like hounds just before they get the fox, they thickened as he watched them. Then he saw what he'd been about to do, and he wiped his forehead, as a man might who's just escaped falling into a pit in the dark.
For it was him they'd come for, not only Jabez Stone. He read it in the glitter of their eyes and in the way the stranger hid his mouth with one hand. And if he fought them with their own weapons, he'd fall into their power; he knew that, though he couldn't have told you how. It was his own anger and horror that burned in their eyes; and he'd have to wipe that out or the case was lost. He stood there for a moment, his black eyes burning like anthracite. And then he began to speak.

Part 4: Betwixt Bewilderment and Understanding
The Mystique of Enlightenment (1982)
Context: I have one thing against medical technology. You see, the very desire to understand the human being is to control him — that is why I am not quite in sympathy. The day you control the endocrine glands, you will change the personality of man; you won't need any brainwashing. Brainwashing is a very elaborate process. If nature had been allowed to go on in its own way, everybody would have become a unique flower. Why should there be only roses in this world? What for? A grass flower or a dandelion flower has as much beauty, as much importance in the scheme of things. Why should there be only jasmine flowers, roses, or some other flower? So, the possibility is there of a change taking place which is sudden, not progressive. It has to happen in a very sudden and explosive way to break the whole thing.

As quoted in "How did I survive my childhood?" in The Telegraph (16 December 2005)

"On Dialogue"
Context: Dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively. We haven't really paid much attention to thought as a process. we have engaged in thoughts, but we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process. Why does thought require attention? Every thinking requires attention, really. If we ran machines withinout paying attention to them, they would break down. Our thought, too, is a process, and it requires attention, otherwise its going to go wrong.

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 267
Context: The ethic of reverence for life constrains all, in whatever walk of life they may find themselves, to busy themselves intimately with all the human and vital processes which are being played out around them, and to give themselves as men to the man who needs human help and sympathy. It does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone, even if he is very useful to the community in so doing. It does not permit the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many by its means. It refuses to let the business man imagine that he fulfills all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others. In what way and in what measure this is his duty, this everyone must decide on the basis of the thoughts which arise in himself, and the circumstances which attend the course of his own life. The self-sacrifice of one may not be particularly in evidence. He carries it out simply by continuing his normal life. Another is called to some striking self-surrender which obliges him to set on one side all regard for his own progress. Let no one measure himself by his conclusions respecting someone else. The destiny of men has to fulfill itself in a thousand ways, so that goodness may be actualized. What every individual has to contribute remains his own secret. But we must all mutually share in the knowledge that our existence only attains its true value when we have experienced in ourselves the truth of the declaration: 'He who loses his life shall find it.

Disputed

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), IX The Practice of Painting
Context: A picture or representation of human figures, ought to be done in such a way as that the spectator may easily recognise, by means of their attitudes, the purpose in their minds. Thus, if you have to represent a man of noble character in the act of speaking, let his gestures be such as naturally accompany good words; and, in the same way, if you wish to depict a man of a brutal nature, give him fierce movements; as with his arms flung out towards the listener, and his head and breast thrust forward beyond his feet, as if following the speaker's hands. Thus it is with a deaf and dumb person who, when he sees two men in conversation — although he is deprived of hearing — can nevertheless understand, from the attitudes and gestures of the speakers, the nature of their discussion.

Address on the anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther King (15 January 1983) http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1983/11583d.htm
1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)
Context: Abraham Lincoln freed the black man. In many ways, Dr. King freed the white man. How did he accomplish this tremendous feat? Where others — white and black — preached hatred, he taught the principles of love and nonviolence. We can be so thankful that Dr. King raised his mighty eloquence for love and hope rather than for hostility and bitterness. He took the tension he found in our nation, a tension of injustice, and channeled it for the good of America and all her people.

A Hero of Our Time (1840; rev. 1841)

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: All of us, no matter from what land our parents came, no matter in what way we may severally worship our Creator, must stand shoulder to shoulder in a united America for the elimination of race and religious prejudice. We must stand for a reign of equal justice to both big and small. We must insist on the maintenance of the American standard of living. We must stand for an adequate national control which shall secure a better training of our young men in time of peace, both for the work of peace and for the work of war. We must direct every national resource, material and spiritual, to the task not of shirking difficulties, but of training our people to overcome difficulties. Our aim must be, not to make life easy and soft, not to soften soul and body, but to fit us in virile fashion to do a great work for all mankind. This great work can only be done by a mighty democracy, with these qualities of soul, guided by those qualities of mind, which will both make it refuse to do injustice to any other nation, and also enable it to hold its own against aggression by any other nation. In our relations with the outside world, we must abhor wrongdoing, and disdain to commit it, and we must no less disdain the baseness of spirit which lamely submits to wrongdoing. Finally and most important of all, we must strive for the establishment within our own borders of that stern and lofty standard of personal and public neutrality which shall guarantee to each man his rights, and which shall insist in return upon the full performance by each man of his duties both to his neighbor and to the great nation whose flag must symbolize in the future as it has symbolized in the past the highest hopes of all mankind.

After joining the Wild West Show in 1886 and traveling to Chicago and New York to learn from the Whites, citing Neihardt in Peter Farb, Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Black Elk Speaks (1961)
Context: I did not see anything to help my people. I could see that the Wasichus [Whites] did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation's hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. They had forgotten that the earth was their mother. This could not be better than the old ways of my people.

On her near-death experience and final days in New York
Edie : American Girl (1982)
Context: "The Siege of the Warwick Hotel." I was left alone with a substantial supply of speed. I started having strange, convulsive behavior. I was shooting up every half-hour... thinking that with each fresh shot I'd knock this nonsense out of my system. I'd entertain myself hanging on to the bathroom sink with my hind feet stopped up against the door, trying to hold myself steady enough so I wouldn't crack my stupid skull open. I entertained myself by making a tape... a really fabulous tape in which I made up five different personalities. I realized that I had to get barbiturates in order to stop the convulsions, which lasted either hours. Something was spinning in my head.... I just kept thinking that if I could pop enough speed I'd knock the daylights out of my system and none of this nonsense would go on. None of this flailing around and moaning, sweating like a pig, and whew! It was a heavy scene. When I finally cooled down to what I thought was pretty good shape, I slipped on a little muumuu, ran down the stairs of the Warwick, barefoot to the lobby. My eye caught a mailman's jacket and a sack of mail hanging across the back of a chair in the hall way entrance, and before I knew what I was doing, I whipped on the jacket, flipped the bag over my shoulder, and flew out the door, whistling a happy tune. Suddenly I thought: "My God! This is a federal offense. Fooling around with the mail." So I turned around and rushed back and BAM! the manager was waiting for me. He ordered me into the back office. They telephoned an ambulance from Bellevue and packed me into it. Five policemen. I was back into convulsions again, which was really a drag, and I tried to tell the doctors and the nurses and the student interns that I'd run out of barbiturates and overshot speed.... I could speak sanely, but all my motor nerves were going crazy wild. It looked like I was out of my mind. If you had seen me, you wouldn't have bothered to listen, and none of them did. Oh, God, it was a nightmare. Finally six big spade attendants came and held me down on a stretcher. They terrified me... their force against mine. I got twice as bad. I just flipped. I told them if they'd just let go of me, I would calm down and stop kicking and fighting. But they wouldn't listen and they started to tell each other what stages of hallucinations I was in... how I imagined myself an animal. All these things totally unreal to my mind and just guessed on their part. Oh, it was insane. Then they plunged a great needle into my butt and BAM! out I went for two whole days. When I woke up, wow! Rats all over the floor, wailing and screaming. We ate potatoes with spoons. The doctors at Bellevue finally contacted my private physician, and after five days he came and got me out. They sent me back to Gracie Square, a private mental hospital that cost a thousand dollars a week. I was there for five months. Then I ran away with a patient and we went to an apartment in the Seventies somewhere which belonged to another patient in the hospital, who gave us the keys. The guy I ran away with was twenty, but he'd been a junkie since the age of nine, so he was pretty emotionally retarded and something of a drag. I didn't have any pills, so, kind of ravaging around, I went to see a gynecologist and a pretty well-off one. He asked me if I would like to shoot up some acid with him. I hadn't much experience with acid, but I wasn't afraid. He closed his office at five, and we took off in his Aston Martin and drove up the coast... no, what's the name of that river? The Hudson. We stopped at a motel and he gave me three ampules of liquid Sandoz acid, intravenously, mainlining, and he gave himself the same amount and he completely flipped, I was hallucinating and trying to tell him what I was seeing. I'd say, "I see rich, embroidered curtains, and I see people moving in the background. It's the Middle Ages and I am a princess, " and I told him he was some sort of royalty. We made love from eight in the evening until seven in the morning with ecstatic climax after climax, just going insane with it, until he realized it was seven and he had to get back to his office to open it at eight-thirty. He gave me a shot to calm me down, and because I couldn't come down, I took about fourteen Placidyls. On the way back something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, but I said out loud, "I wish I was dead"... the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience I'd just gone through were really so alien. I didn't even know the man... it had been a one-night jag... he was married and had children... and I just felt lost. It hardly seemed worth living any more because once again I was alone. He dropped me off at the apartment where I was staying with the runaway patient. I had a little Bloody Mary when I got there, and dropped a few more Placidyls. With my tolerance, nothing should have happened, but I suddenly went into a coma. My eyes rolled back in my head. It was lucky... I had called an aide, Jimmy, at the hospital - he had been a good friend - I had called him anonymously and asked him to come and visit us. He happened to turn up just as I went into the coma. He and the heroin addict tried to wake me up. They slapped me and pumped my chest and they put me in a bathtub full of really cold water. Jimmy began to call hospitals - not psychiatric but medical - and one of them actually told them to let me sleep it off. But Jimmy just flipped. He knew I was dying, and he was right. He called Lenox Hill Hospital, and the police finally came. Jimmy and the heroin addict were taken into custody, and I was rushed to the hospital. I was actually declared dead. My mother was called... and then BAM! I started breathing again. I was pretty shaken up by what happened because I didn't understand how I could have almost gone out on just fifteen Placidyls when I used to live on thirty-five three-grain Tunials a day, plus alcohol. They released Jimmy and the junkie, but of course I was still in the trap. I thought I was fine and that I could leave. But a psychiatrist came to interview me and I was put in the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital - committed on the grounds of unintentional, unconscious suicide. It was a pretty devastating experience. They put me on eight hundred milligrams of Thorazine four times a day plus six hundred milligrams at bedtime - an ugly-tasting liquid, but it took quick effect and you couldn't hide the pills or spit them out later. I had all kinds of bad reactions from it - I'd get bad tremors and all itchy and wormy. I said I wasn't going to take the stuff any more, no matter what, so they finally took me off it one day. I had a seizure, vomited all over the floor, and I couldn't get tremendous dosages of Thorazine, but they accused me of importing drugs and taking them there in the hospital. My doctor was young... a resident... and I just told him, "You think I've taken drugs. There's no point in even reasoning with you. I'll just go to some other hospital." I expected to go to some plush, tolerable hospital, but I was not accepted in any private hospital with the record they gave me. They committed me to Manhattan State on Ward's Island, in the middle of the East River, next to the prison. It was one of the most unpleasant experiences I've ever been through. Really terrifying. I lived in a big dormitory on a ward with about sixty to eighty women. We did all the mopping, cleaning, making beds, scrubbing toilets. And the people there were just so awful. Really pathetic. Some of them were mean. The staff completely ignored you except to administer medication. I thought it was never going to end. In Manhattan State, even in there, there were pushers. One girl who lived in a smaller dormitory - there were two with about ten beds in them - was pushing speed and heroin. And because I'd been warned that if ever you were caught using drugs in a state hospital you'd be criminally punished, I didn't touch any drugs during the three months I was there.

To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1736/
The Rose (1893)
Context: Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;
The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,
Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;

Source: Discipleship (1937), Revenge, p. 141.
Context: The right way to requite evil, according to Jesus, is not to resist it. This saying of Christ removes the Church from the sphere of politics and law. The Church is not to be a national community like the old Israel, but a community of believers without political or national ties. The old Israel had been both — the chosen people of God and a national community, and it was therefore his will that they should meet force with force. But with the Church it is different: it has abandoned political and national status, and therefore it must patiently endure aggression. Otherwise evil will be heaped upon evil. Only thus can fellowship be established and maintained.
At this point it becomes evident that when a Christian meets with injustice, he no longer clings to his rights and defends them at all costs. He is absolutely free from possessions and bound to Christ alone. Again, his witness to this exclusive adherence to Jesus creates the only workable basis for fellowship, and leaves the aggressor for him to deal with.
The only way to overcome evil is to let it run itself to a stand-still because it does not find the resistance it is looking for. Resistance merely creates further evil and adds fuel to the flames. But when evil meets no opposition and encounters no obstacle but only patient endurance, its sting is drawn, and at last it meets an opponent which is more than its match. Of course this can only happen when the last ounce of resistance is abandoned, and the renunciation of revenge is complete. Then evil cannot find its mark, it can breed no further evil, and is left barren.

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man.

E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 1
Minima Moralia (1951)
Context: The son of well-to-do parents who … engages in a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, that he is suspected of being a secret envoy of the established powers. … The real resistance lies elsewhere. The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become “practical,” a business with strict division of labor, departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He … is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants to make a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist. The urge to suspend the division of labor which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies. The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates this division of labor—if only by taking pleasure in his work—makes himself vulnerable by its standards, in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority. Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game.

Quoted in Good Housekeeping (November 1989), p. 92.
Context: Hope, faith, love and a strong will to live offer no promise of immortality, only proof of our uniqueness ans human beings and the opportunity to experience full growth even under the grimmest circumstances. Far more real than the ticking of time is the way we open up the minutes and invest them with meaning. Death is not the ultimate tragedy in life. The ultimate tragedy is to die without discovering the possibilities of full growth.

Book VII, 7.66-[3]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book VII

Nobel Address (1991)
Context: During the last six years we have discarded and destroyed much that stood in the way of a renewal and transformation of our society. But when society was given freedom it could not recognize itself, for it had lived too long, as it were, "beyond the looking glass". Contradictions and vices rose to the surface, and even blood has been shed, although we have been able to avoid a bloodbath. The logic of reform has clashed with the logic of rejection, and with the logic of impatience which breeds intolerance.

The Folly Of Being Comforted http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1623/
In The Seven Woods (1904)
Context: One that is ever kind said yesterday:
'Your well-belovéd's hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seems impossible, and so
All that you need is patience.'
Heart cries, 'No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.'
O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head,
You'd know the folly of being comforted.

Unkempt Thoughts (1957), p. 27

§ 243
The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695)
Context: The greatest part of mankind want leisure or capacity for demonstration, nor can carry a train of proofs, which in that way they must always depend upon for conviction, and cannot be required to assent to till they see the demonstration. Wherever they stick, the teachers are always put upon proof, and must clear the doubt by a thread of coherent deductions from the first principle, how long or how intricate soever that be. And you may as soon hope to leave all the day labourers and tradesmen, the spinsters and dairy-maids, perfect mathematicians, as to have them perfect in ethics this way: having plain commands is the sure and only course to bring them to obedience and practice: the greatest part cannot know, and therefore they must believe. And I ask, whether one coming from heaven in the power of God, in full and clear evidence and demonstration of miracles, giving plain and direct rules of morality and obedience, be not likelier to enlighten the bulk of mankind, and set them right in their duties, and bring them to do them, than by reasoning with them from general notions and principles of human reason?

Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
Context: I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.

Billy writing a letter to a newspaper describing the Tralfamadorians
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Context: The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

Context: How do I know that enjoying life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death we are not like people who got lost in early childhood and do not know the way home? Lady Li was the child of a border guard in Ai. When first captured by the state of Jin, she wept so much her clothes were soaked. But after she entered the palace, shared the king's bed, and dined on the finest meats, she regretted her tears. How do I know that the dead do not regret their previous longing for life? One who dreams of drinking wine may in the morning weep; one who dreams weeping may in the morning go out to hunt. During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen. How dense! You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night.