“we are human beings, we are born full of guilt; we feel terrified when happiness becomes a real possibility.”

As quoted in Visions : How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century (1999) by Michio Kaku, p. 295
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

Book I, Ch. 2
My Antonia (1918)
Context: I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Girls & Boys
Song lyrics, Parade Under the Cherry Moon (1986)

Tom Masson in: The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Vol. 61 (1901). p. 319.

“An Unprejudiced Mind,” p. 326
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

The Plight of Iraqi Christians https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/519/article/plight-iraqi-christians (February 21, 2005)

Context: From the moment of birth every human being wants happiness and freedom and wants to avoid suffering. In this we are all the same; and the more we care for the happiness of others the greater our own sense of each other becomes. Many of our problems are created by ourselves based on divisions due to ideology, religion, race, resources, economic status or other factors. The time has come to think on a deeper, more human level and appreciate and respect our sameness as human beings. And to have a respect for endangered cultures that share these principles. We are at the dawn of an age in which many people feel that extreme political concepts should cease to dominate human affairs. We should use this opportunity to replace them with universal human and spiritual values and ensure that these values become the fiber of the global family that is emerging. It is not possible to find peace with anger, hatred, jealousy or greed. At every level of society, familial, tribal, national and international, the key to a happier and more peaceful and successful world is the growth of compassion. We do not necessarily need to become religious, nor even believe in an ideology. We need only to develop our good human qualities and know that love and compassion are the most essential concepts for human survival. So long as human beings live and suffer, the only world open to our present knowledge, the brotherhood of man will seem an unattainable principle. In order for us to achieve real lasting peace among one another, the effort to realize that noblest and most satisfactory moral value must be occupation of every individual intelligence.

The Compassionate Life (2001) Ch. 3 "Global Compassion".

25 February, 2016
As President, 2016
Source: El País http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/02/24/videos/1456319939_010865.html