Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we’ve always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

I’m not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

I don’t think even ungodly people realize what a society would be like that had no godly influence at all.

I believe the home and marriage is the foundation of our society and must be protected.

Our single most important challenge is therefore to help establish a social order in which the freedom of the individual will truly mean the freedom of the individual.

One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.

Ritual is another word for fear, manifested in a different way.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

America is just downright mean.

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

The moral disapprobation of society has an impact on behavior in societies.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

I was in my thirteenth year when I heard a voice from God to help me govern my conduct. And the first time I was very much afraid.

True nobility is exempt from fear.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.

We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.

Meditation can help us embrace our worries, our fear, our anger; and that is very healing. We let our own natural capacity of healing do the work.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

In our seeking for economic and political progress, we all go up – or else we all go down.

We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.

Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.

The Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It’s either ‚rawk‘ or it’s not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.

Worry – a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

At first, I was scared to show fear because you can never be sure how people will perceive you. But I dared myself to do that, to stand out. Now I’ll talk about being beaten up or robbed or making a stupid decision because of a girl or whatever.

If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are the father, the mother and the teacher.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

If workers are more insecure, that’s very ‚healthy‘ for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations‘ economic health.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child.

We have an epidemic of insecure people in our society today.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

As a vulnerability researcher, the greatest barrier I see is our low tolerance for vulnerability. We’re almost afraid to be happy. We feel like it’s inviting disaster.

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

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Seeing Pax get extra-nervous about which shirt he is going to wear when he meets Aung San Suu Kyi, I get very moved. He rightfully doesn’t get nervous going to a movie premiere; he gets nervous going to meet her.

Some people will have to be afraid. Those who plunder the nation, deliver injustice, will have to feel scared of me. And I am not afraid of admitting this. Government cannot be so lenient that it forgives them.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society.

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.