Tyrants preserve themselves by sowing fear and mistrust among the citizens by means of spies, by distracting them with foreign wars, by eliminating men of spirit who might lead a revolution, by humbling the people, and making them incapable of decisive action.
To be constantly without desire is the way to have a vision of the mystery of heaven and earth. For constantly to have desire is the means by which their limitations are seen.
I repeat to you-my own view is, is that if a State-if people decide to-what they do in the privacy of their house, consenting adults should be able to do. This is America. It's a free society, but it doesn't mean we have to redefine traditional marriage.
Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is all the very nature of the soul. Love is life. All, all that I understand, I understand only because of love. All is bound up in love alone. Love is God and dying means for me a particle of love, to go back to the universal and eternal source of love.
I think it's time to stop carping on the blunders of the President and give him some credit for creativity. I mean, where do you even FIND a Jewish hard-line conservative Republican pot-smoker? Sounds like an Oprah Winfrey guest.
If what was said in the Ethics is true, that the happy life is the life according to virtue lived without impediment, and that virtue is a mean, then the life which is in a mean, and in a mean attainable by every one, must be the best. And the same principles of virtue and vice are characteristic of cities and of constitutions; for the constitution is in a figure the life of the city.
If one day I have a daughter and my daughter wants to be a model, I would never let her! But then, if she wants to, what can I do? But definitely not until she's 18 years old. You know, every work has the bad side, and people will be mean to you, and when you're young, you don't know how to defend yourself.
It will be hard to find a parallel in history in which unarmed people have represented the urge for freedom, turning their armlessness into the central means for deliverance.
The available supply of gold and silver being wholly inadequate to permit the issuance of coins of intrinsic value or paper currency convertible into coin of intrinsic value or paper currency convertible into coin in the volume required to serve the needs of the People, some other basis for the issue of currency must be developed, and some means other than that of convertibility into coin must be developed to prevent undue fluctuation in the value of paper currency or any other substitute for money intrinsic value that may come into use.
If someone smells a flower and says he does not understand, the reply to him is: there is nothing to understand, it is only a scent. If he persists, saying: that I know, but what does it all mean? Then one has either to change the subject, or make it more abstruse by saying that the scent is the shape which the universal joy takes in the flower.
As an individual who undertakes to live by borrowing, soon finds his original means devoured by interest, and next no one left to borrow from - so must it be with a government.
to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap