I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

If you can’t beat them, arrange to have them beaten.

It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

My speculation is that the U.S. does not want to establish the principle that it has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.

Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.

A person hears only what they understand.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

Often, little situations trigger enormous reactions. Be there, present for it. Your partner will find it easier to see it in you, and you will find it easier to see it in them.

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.

Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that’s their gift.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.

In my experience, many people confuse being cowardly with being nice.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

When we’re looking for compassion, we need someone who is deeply rooted, is able to bend and, most of all, embraces us for our strengths and struggles.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.

Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don’t see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

Deliberate violence is more to be quenched than a fire.

When you have enough understanding and compassion in you, then that amount of understanding and compassion will try to express itself in action. And your practice should help you to cultivate more understanding and compassion.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

I think life is a matter of choices and that wherever we are, good or bad, is because of choices we make.

I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.

Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last – but eat you he will.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.

It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. You’d wake up in a concert and think, Wow, how did I get here?

Hear reason, or she’ll make you feel her.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‚Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?‘ We must always consider the person.

Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.

People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?

To suffer the penalty of too much haste, which is too little speed.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don’t want victories anymore.

Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.