“There is no such thing as being non-political. Just by making a decision to stay out of politics you are making the decision to allow others to shape politics and exert power over you. And if you are alienated from the current political system, then just by staying out of it you do nothing to change it, you simply entrench it.”
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are just rearranging their prejudices.”
“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.”
“I am not pro-this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti-injustice, anti-oppression.”
“We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love.
Be poor among the poor.
We need to include the excluded and preach peace.”
“After thinking long and hard about what life will be like when we die, I’m convinced that so much is dependent on our life now and on our state of mind at the moment of death. To prepare yourself for that inevitable journey you must begin to take responsibility for all that you are in this life, to look at your life with clarity and assess it with truth. It seems that our delusions about what life holds for us in the hereafter arise from our delusions about who we are in the here and now. If we can accept that we are already spirit beings living in a spirit realm, we can accept that death is not so much a journey to a different world but to a different state of mind.”
“Trainers use humor to point out negative behaviors in ways that teach rather than preach. Mediators tell us that the right joke, or the right moment of levity, can reduce tensions to the point that two adversaries can sit down at the table to consider the possibility of agreement. So why does humor work? Because it shatters preconceptions at the moment when people are forming new perceptions—about their work, their spouse, or life itself. Laughter is a release; it is a moment of sheer pleasure. And in our world of tension and turmoil, the belly laugh is a physical escape valve. Choosing the humor is another matter. We live an era of the put-down, the snide aside, the searing retort. These comments do have their place, but all too often they make us laugh at someone else’s expense. Good humor, nourishing humor for example, enables us to laugh at ourselves for being human. It serves as a window into our souls.”
“Indeed, the test of orderliness in a country is not the number of millionaires it owns, but the absence of starvation among its masses.”
“Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.”
“It is what we make of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”