When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, "I am all this!" There is simply all this.
We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings. If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we've chosen to govern ourselves.
My tax plan will cut taxes for 95 percent of workers, because we need to put money back into the pockets of struggling middle-class families and close the egregious tax loopholes that have exploded over the last eight years. My plan eliminates capital gains taxes entirely for the small businesses and start-ups that are the backbone of our economy, as opposed to John McCain's plan, which would tax these businesses. John McCain is running to serve out a third Bush term. But the truth is, when it comes to taxes, that's not being fair to George Bush.
Republican or Democrat candidate for Presidency ought to say: I look forward to working with the president to solve the problem. People expect us to come here to solve problems. And thus far, the attitude has been: Let's just kind of ignore what the president has said and just hope somebody else comes and solves it for us. And that's what I'd be running on. I'd be running on the economy and I'd be running on national security. But since I'm not running, I can only serve as an adviser to those who are.
People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.
Nature grinds all of us. Keep count of the ounce of pleasure you get. In the long run, nature did her work through you, and when you die your body will make other plants grow. Yet we think all the time that we are getting pleasure ourselves. Thus the wheel goes round.
What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.
Any man that resists the present tides that run in the world, will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem he has been separated from his human kind forever.
One must console oneself with the thought that time has a sieve through which most of these important things run into the ocean of oblivion and what remains after this selection is often still trite and bad.
I understand Goldman Sachs businesses. We do lot of business with him, and GE has been - I think it's the longest running stock in the Dow Jones industrial average. It will be 100 years now it will be around. I hope I'm around then, too. And it was an attractive investment. And we have had a lot of money around, over the last two years, and we're seeing things that are attractive now.
Take this at least, this last advice, my son:
Keep a stiff rein, and move but gently on:
The coursers of themselves will run too fast,
Your art must be to moderate their haste.
Obama administration has been the most narcotics-jailing administration ever. I just think it's so ironic and underhanded. It's so contrary to the consciousness and the feeling of the rest of the country. With a Democrat running things, it's still just the same things going on.