My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.
An apology for the actions of some troops who, of course, are not representative of the majority of the armed forces here, I think that would have been useful and it would have helped to some extent.
How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?
To concentrate is not to meditate, even though that is what most of you do, calling it meditation. And if concentration is not meditation, then what is? Surely, meditation is to understand every thought that comes into being, and not to dwell upon one particular thought; it is to invite all thoughts so that you understand the whole process of thinking.
The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.
I turn on the TV sometimes, start watching something and think: 'This seems quite good, a bit familiar.' Then I realise … It's one of my movies. It's a pretty odd feeling.
The orators and the despots have the least power in their cities ... since they do nothing that they wish to do, practically speaking, though they do whatever they think to be best.
People can get obsessed with romance, they can get obsessed with political paranoia, they can get obsessed with horror. It's isn't the fault of the subject matter that creates the obsession, I don't think.
As one boy said, 'I was thinking all these horrible thoughts about my parents when suddenly it hit me-if they're all that bad, how come I'm so wonderful'
Intelligence is a separate gift, for the benefit of students, so that they may think of themselves as intellectual and not very intelligent, or intelligent and not very intellectual. One hopes, of course, that they try to bring the two virtues, the two elements, into their lives at the same time.
Everything that we believe in and count on is really in question right now. Our safety net, public education, housing, health care, so many things that are fundamental to a healthy democracy, are under attack. So I think, in general we've got a lot of work to do.
We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.
I think that the risk to all the progress we've made was at stake in the election because not just the president-elect but a lot of members of Congress, including now the Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader, have said that their principal agenda was to undo a lot of this progress. But as I've been talking about over the last several days when it comes to health care, the gains that we've made are there. Twenty million people have health insurance that didn't have it before. The uninsured rate is the lowest it's ever been.
I am not agnostic. I am atheist. I don’t think there is no God; I know there’s no God. I know there’s no God the same way I know many other laws in our universe. I know there’s no God and I know most of the world knows that as well. They just won’t admit it because there’s another thing they know. They know they’re going to die and it freaks them out. So most people don’t have the courage to admit there’s no God and they know it. They feel it. They try to suppress it. And if you bring it up they get angry because it freaks them out.
We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.