If you want to change the world, first try to improve and bring about change within yourself. That will help change your family. From there it just gets bigger and bigger. Everything we do has some effect, some impact.
We're going to have the best educated American people in the world. People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.
One of the things you learn as president is, as powerful as this office is, you have limited bandwidth. And the time goes by really quickly and you're constantly making choices, and there are pressures on you from all different directions - pressures on your attention, not just pressures from different constituencies. And so you have to be pretty focused about where can you have the biggest, quickest impact.
We do not know how much our climate could or will change in the future. We do not know how fast change will occur or even how some of our actions could impact it.
Confusion conditions activity, which conditions consciousness, which conditions embodied personality, which conditions sensory experiences, which conditions impact, which conditions mood, which conditions craving, which conditions clinging, which conditions becoming, which conditions birth, which conditions aging and death.
There is profound responsibility in being Love... more than the mind could imagine or hold up under. If most human beings truly realized the impact that they have on the whole, they'd be crushed by the realization of it.
This is not some distant problem of the future. This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now. Whether it means increased flooding, greater vulnerability to drought, more severe wildfires - all these things are having an impact on Americans as we speak.
I never expected to have any kind of film career, to be honest. It was all a bit of a surprise. But I was in a big hit play on Broadway. America, as many people will say, says yes more often than we do. And so I was suddenly surrounded by people saying yes. But I was aware that was 'cause of what I was in. It had a big impact.
I have not been part of an active counterculture movement, as it is not the approach that I have personally pursued to create a qualitatively beneficial and meaningful impact on society.