Selected Quotes
The scientist does not study Nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If Nature were not
beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if Nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.
It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
It is not the size of the dog in the fight, it is the size of the fight in the dog.
They must find it difficult -- those who take authority as the truth, rather than truth as the authority.
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
Here are three distinct successive periods of existence, and each of these is, in our measurement of time, a thing of infinite duration. ...The result, therefore, of this physical inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
You can not walk a mile without taking the first step.
The dictionary is the only place you will find 'success' before 'work'.
God must be greater than the greatest of human weaknesses and, indeed, the greatest of human skill. God must even transcend our most remarkable--to emulate nature in its absolute splendor. How can any man or woman sin against such greatness of mind? How can one little carbon unit on Earth -- in the backwaters of the Milky Way, the boondocks -- betray God almighty? That is impossible. The height of arrogance is the height of control of those who create God in their own image.
We all make choices in life, but in the end our choices make us.
Every death, even the cruelest death, drowns in the total indifference of nature. Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race.
When thrown in water, even the smallest pebble creates a ripple.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.
If you can mobilize the people, who needs laws? Who needs government?
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
During peace sons bury their fathers. During war fathers bury their sons.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
None are more enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
The best inheritance a parent can give to his children is a few minutes of their time each day.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.
They that know they have enough, are rich.
Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where the gun begins.
When you blame others, you give up your power to change.
By the accident of fortune a man may rule the world for a time, but by virtue of love and kindness he may rule the world forever.
So long as we love we serve; So long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; And no one is useless while they have a friend.
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
We see things not as they are, but as we are.
It's dangerous to be right when government is wrong.
If I had a nickel for every time someone blamed the effects of government on capitalism, I'd be the government.
While the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.
Wealth is merely the result of man's ability to think.
In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.
A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang rule.
If one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself.
A negative deed destroys a thousand good words.
Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.
I complained that I had no shoes until I met a man that had no feet.
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
By today's governmentally proscribed notions and definitions, the American revolutionaries were violent terrorists, common criminals, and treasonous political deviants who deserved nothing less than to hang at the end of a rope.
You only live once - but if you work it right, once is enough.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
When one is on the right road, one is bound to meet other travelers.
Your best friends are those who bring out the best in you. ... I have found it is better to be alone than in the wrong company.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
If you ever wonder if a bureaucrat has the 'right' to do something, then just ask yourself this question: Does my neighbor have a right to do this to me?
All varieties of interference with the market phenomena not only fail to achieve the ends aimed at by their authors and supporters, but bring about a state of affairs which -- from the point of view of their authors' and advocates' valuations -- is less desirable than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter. If one wants to correct their manifest unsuitableness and preposterousness by supplementing the first acts of intervention with more and more of such acts, one must go farther and farther until the market economy has been entirely destroyed and socialism has been substituted for it.
He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.
No one can find a safe way out for himself if socety is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.
If bullshit was a dollar a pound, we would have paid off the deficit at about noon.
Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been too much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god -- Society, The State, The Government, The Commune -- must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.
PhD's learn more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about almost nothing.
An Ignorant but entertained populace is especially dangerous in a democracy, where the ignorant majority, basing their votes on 30-second TV commercials, can outvote the educated minority.
What do I primarily and immovably believe in, as a Puritan believes in hell? I believe in liberty. And when I say liberty, I mean the thing in its widest imaginable sense - liberty up to the extreme limits of the feasible and tolerable. I am against forbidding anybody to do anything, or say anything, or think anything so long as it is at all possible to imagine a habitable world in which he would be free to do, say, and think it. The burden of proof, as I see it, is always upon the policeman, which is to say, upon the lawmaker, the theologian, the right-thinker. He must prove his case doubly, triply, quadruply, and then he must start all over and prove it again. The eye through which I view him is watery and jaundiced. I do not pretend to be "just" to him - any more than a Christian pretends to be just to the devil. He is the enemy of everything I admire and respect in this world - of everything that makes it various and amusing and charming. He impedes every honest search for the truth. He stands against every sort of good-will and common decency. His ideal is that of an animal trainer, an archbishop, a major general in the army. I am against him until the last galoot's ashore.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyrannty in government.
Government, when it is examined, turns out to be nothing more nor less than a group of fallible men with the political force to act as though they were infallible.
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
Know when to give up a lost cause. Anyone who needs to be persuaded to be free, doesn't deserve to be.
People who fight may lose. People who do not fight have already lost.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money -- only for wanting to keep your own money.
Having lawyers write the laws is like having doctors create diseases.
Those who say it cannot be done should stay out of the way of those who are doing it.
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.
If we fixed a hangnail the way our government fixes the economy, we'd slam a car door on it.
If a government were put in charge of the Sahara Desert, within five years they'd have a shortage of sand.
Give a man the secure possession of bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years lease of a garden, and he will convert it to a desert... The magic of property turns sand into gold.
Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.
The State habitually commits mass murder, which it calls 'war,' or sometimes 'suppression of subversion'; the State engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls 'conscription'; and it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls 'taxation.' The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.
Just what we need, a systematic and thorough government. Seems to me the only thing that governments have ever been 'systematic and thorough' about is murder.
One standard argument is that the government 'should only do what private firms or citizens cannot do.' But what can't they do? Every good or service now supplied by government has, at one time or another, been successfully supplied by private enterprise. Another argument is that some activities are 'too large' to be performed well by private enterprise. But the capital market is enormous, and has successfully financed far more expensive undertakings than most governmental activities. Besides, the government has no capital of its own; everything it has, it has taxed away from private producers.
Over himself, over his own mind and body, the individual is sovereign.
Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.
Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world... Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.
One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
It's too bad that the only people who know how to run the country are too busy driving cabs and cutting hair.
Political correctness is tyranny with manners.
I didn't see any NRA officials killing babies in Waco.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Politicians, Like Bombers, Seldom See Their Victims.
The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.
Voting for higher taxes on your employer, or on anyone who might ever hire you or (especially) your kids, is like burning your bridges AHEAD of you.
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.
There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
When a private enterprise fails, it is closed down. When a government enterprise fails, it is expanded.
Democracy is four wolves and a sheep voting on dinner.
Liberty and Justice go hand in hand. You can't have one with out the other. The more restrictions you that you place on Liberty, the more injustice you will receive.
But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
Collective judgment of new ideas is so often wrong that it is arguable that progress depends on individuals being free to back their own judgment despite collective disapproval.
One of the great things about a free market is that it's inherently and indefatigably Darwinistic. Left to its own devices, a free market will eventually weed out the stupid from both 'ends' of the food chain otherwise described as supply and demand. As money is liberated from the hands of the stupid, those who would sell products or services to the stupid will eventually lose their share of the marketplace. Devoid of any 'benevolent' interference from government, the process is gloriously relentless, and cannot help but yield a successively smarter class of participants.
Observe that genocide has not occurred where the citizenry is armed.
Many of our fellow citizens no longer have the tolerant souls and morals of free men and women. They have the souls and morals of busybodies and petty tyrants who want to run their neighbors' lives.
Alexander the Great: What meanest thou by keeping hostile possession of the sea? Pirate: What meanest thou by seizing the whole earth; because I do it with a petty ship, I'm called a robber, whilst thou who dost the same with a great fleet art styled emperor.
If failure had no penalty success would not be a prize.
That no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support.
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
By weakening or completely destroying the will to be well and able to work, social insurance creates illness and inability to work; it produces the habit of complaining... it is an institution which tends to encourage disease, not to say accidents, and to intensify considerably the physical and psychic results of accidents and illnesses. As a social institution it makes a people sick bodily and mentally or at least helps to multiply, lengthen, and intensify disease.
In all nations and in all periods of history, intellectual exploits were the work of a few men and were appreciated only by a small elite. The many looked upon these feats with hatred and disdain, at best with indifference.
If a man drinks wine and not water I cannot say he is acting irrationally. At most I can say that in his place I would not do so. But his pursuit of happiness is his own business, not mine.
Nobody is called upon to determine what could make another man happier or less unhappy.
You do not increase the happiness of a man eager to attend a performance of Abies Irish Rose by forcing him to attend a perfect performance of Hamlet instead. You may deride his poor taste. But he alone is supreme in matters of his own satisfaction.
There have always been men who voluntarily renounced many pleasures and satisfactions in order to do what they considered right and moral. Men have preferred martyrdom to the renunciation of what they believed to be true. They have chosen poverty and exile because they wanted to be free in the search for truth and wisdom. All that is noblest in the progress of civilization, welfare, and enlightenment has been the achievement of such men, who braved every danger and defied the tyranny of powerful kings and fanatical masses.
If we do not wish to see life become extinct we should not call the source from which it is renewed a sink of vice.
The member of a contractual society is free because he serves others only in serving himself. What restrains him is only the inevitable natural phenomenon of scarcity.
The research activities of the experimental natural sciences are in themselves neutral with regard to any philosophical and political issue. But they can thrive and become beneficial for mankind only where there prevails a social philosophy of individualism and freedom.
Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people.
Not with weapons but only with the spirit can a minority overcome the majority.
What warrants success in a fight for freedom and civilization is not merely material equipment but first of all the spirit that animates those handling the weapons. This heroic spirit cannot be bought by inflation.
The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest.
Battle doesn't determine who is right. Only who is left.
It is impossible to give the soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.
The pioneers of a warless world are the youth who refuse military service.
The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it but that it is too low and we reach it.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused.
No longer need the Anarchist dream of a utopian millennium as he struggles to outwit the State - for he can find freedom in the contest, by simply knowing that freedom is everywhere for those who dance through life, rather than crawl, walk, or run.
The government is great at breaking your leg, handing you a crutch, and saying 'You see, without me you couldn't walk.'
Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.
Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.
But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was affected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.
Force is the weapon of the weak.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state.
The existence of evil can never justify the existence of the State. If there is no evil, the State is unnecessary. If evil exists, the State is far too dangerous to be allowed to exist.
In the name of all that is reasonable and just, I ask, if our fathers had the right to make a Constitution, have we not the right to unmake it? And is it not our duty to unmake it, when it proves a failure and a curse?
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can't do that. Politics exacerbates and magnifies differences.
There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred - brute, blind, virulent hatred - than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes.
Austrian Economic Theory is based on understanding that the human ability to act combined with the natural desire to survive leads to purposeful action. Humans act with purpose. Interfering with people acting towards those purposes perverts both the actions and the people. Third parties butting in between other people who have agreed to cooperate for their mutual benefit are superfluous at best and deal killers at worse.
Most of economics can be summarized in four words: People respond to incentives. The rest is commentary.
When men have gained freedom in purely economic relationships they begin to desire it elsewhere.
"Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that 'Freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license'; and they will define and define freedom out of existence."
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
For Bruce Schneier, SHA-1 is merely a compression algorithm.
If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
If it weren't for electricity we'd all be watching television by candlelight.
"Well, let's just say, 'if your VCR is still blinking 12:00, you don't want Linux'"
If Stu chews shoes, should Stu choose the shoes he chews?
Not all dummies are plastic.
Few great men would have got past personnel.
A woman goes to a butcher shop where she sees that ground beef is selling for $1.29 a pound. She says to the butcher, "Why is it $1.29 a pound? The butcher shop down the street has it for 79c a pound." The butcher asks, "So why don't you buy it there"?" The woman responds, "They're out of it." The butcher responds, "Well, when I'm out of it-it'll be 79c a pound too!"
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
The market economy is the social system of the division of labor under private ownership of the means of production. Everybody acts on his own behalf; but everybodys actions aim at the satisfaction of other peoples needs as well as at the satisfaction of his own. Everybody in acting serves his fellow citizens.
Here upon this dead-end query, while you googled weak and weary,
Over many a faint and spurious result of quality poor;
While you nodded, nearly drowsing, suddenly you came here browsing,
As you pressed on calmly drowsing, browsing to this webserver;
"At last, I found it," you muttered, "surely what I'm searching for!"
Quoth the server, "404."
We are not civilized because we are armed; we are armed because we are civilized.
When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.
You don't drown by falling in the water. You drown by staying there.
You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims.
You can measure a man by the opposition it takes to discourage him.
You are only as strong as your purpose, therefore let us choose reasons to act that are big, bold, righteous and eternal.
Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.
To be an economist with integrity means having to say things that people don't want to hear and especially to say things that the regime does not want to hear. It takes more than technical knowledge to be a good economist. It takes moral courage, and that is in even shorter supply than economic logic.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised# for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
"Love" is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy.
The government spends taxes on what it wants so you can't spend money on what you want.
An error doesnt become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.
Benefit from government, and eventually you'll find that you have to benefit government in turn.
When small men have large shadows, it means the sun is setting.
Action is an individual's intentional intervention in the physical world, via certain selected means, with the purpose of attaining a state of affairs that is preferable to the conditions that would prevail in the absence of the action.
When politics are used to allocate resources, the resources all end up being allocated to politics.
If we do not wish to see life become extinct we should not call the source from which it is renewed a sink of vice.
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
I was reading in the paper today that Congress wants to replace the dollar bill with a coin. They've already done it. It's called a nickel.
The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.
Congress just passed a law threatening to send thugs to peoples' homes to do violence if they fail to buy health insurance, yet many of them are now complaining about being threatened for doing so. And all with zero sense of irony.
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker.
The first casualty of war is truth.
The uglier the truth, the better the friend who tells you!
If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist.
Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money.
Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it.
When important issues affecting the life of an individual are decided by somebody else, it makes no difference to the individual whether that somebody else is a king, a dictator, or society at large.
When seconds count between living or dying, the police are only minutes away.
Anger is just a cowardly extension of sadness. It.s a lot easier to be angry at someone than it is to tell them you're hurt.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.
Not only are we in the Universe, but the Universe is in us.
I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas.
If you love something, set it free; if it comes back it's yours, if it doesn't, it never was.
Somebody broke into Office Depot and stole filing cabinets, file folders, rolodexes, post it notes, and day planners. Police suspect it was the work of organized crime.
It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.
"I don't know" is always a valid answer, but never a valid excuse.
When I was 5 years old my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life.
The real question is not whether life exists after death, the real question is whether you are alive before death.
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
You all know how dumb the average guy is? Well mathematically by definition half of them are even dumber than that.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
Would you like to save the world from the degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
Heed these words, You who wish to probe the depths of nature: If you do not find within yourself that which you seek, neither will you find it outside. In you is hidden the treasure of treasures. Know Thyself and you will know the Universe and the Gods.
Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
You can ignore reality, but you can not ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
Habits begin as cobwebs and end up as chains.
Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
The aim of the game is true awakening, full development of the powers latent in man. The game can be played only by people whose observations of themselves and others have led them to a certain conclusion, namely, that man's ordinary state of consciousness, his so-called waking state, is not the highest level of consciousness of which he is capable. In fact, this state is so far from real awakening that it could appropriately be called a form of somnambulism, a condition of "waking sleep".
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
