So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

I think that we have opportunities all around us – sometimes we just don’t recognize them.

I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I’m here.

Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.

I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and ocean in the world, were united to support me in the task to which I have now been dedicated with such solemnity.

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

No one knows who is listening, say nothing you would not wish put in the newspapers.

The thing about delirium is you think it’s great, but it actually isn’t.

Please think of me like an endangered species and just observe me quietly from far away. If you try to talk to me or touch me casually, I may get intimidated and bite you. So please be careful.

When you’re not engaged in the day-to-day struggles that everybody feels, you slowly start losing touch. And I think it’s important for the people in the White House to have a finger on the pulse.

What medicines do not heal, the lance will; what the lance does not heal, fire will.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

I’m trying to keep a level head. You have to be careful out in the world. It’s so easy to get turned.

How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

Today, the news is scandals; that is news, but the many children who don’t have food – that’s not news. This is grave. We can’t rest easy while things are this way.

Beware the tyranny of the weak. They just suck you dry.

If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Once people are aware of your presence, and perhaps vaguely intrigued, you need to stir their interest before it settles on someone else.

Basically what I’m trying to tell you is that it’s almost impossible to drive a jet ski at night time unless you’re in a city with lights lit up so you can navigate. Besides being pitch black, that water turn black at night. Listen, I don’t recommend it.

If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

I am not stupid. I am a very bright guy. I know that in the fighting game, you get people who get brain damage and do themselves long-term harm.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

Hatreds not vowed and concealed are to be feared more than those openly declared.

What most people know but don’t realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn’t there, we’d be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.

Don’t go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you’ll land in trouble too big for you.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in – in 2007, we just didn’t know it was uncertain. It was – uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn’t know it.

The movement of search can only be from the known to the known, and all that the mind can do is to be aware that this movement will never uncover the unknown. Any movement on the part of the known is still within the field of the known.

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.

I think if someone gets kicked in the face it is their fault – they watched the foot come towards their face.

The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.

Whether we are New Dealer, Old Dealer, Liberty Leaguer or Red, whether we agree or not, we still have the right to think and speak how we feel.

Depression runs in my family on both sides, and I have to be wary.

Back when I was in school, few people understood dyslexia and what to do for it. My teachers thought I was lazy and not very clever, and I got bored easily… thinking of all the things I could do once I left school. I couldn’t always follow what was going on.

Every step of life shows much caution is required.

When I was a sophomore at USC, I was a socialist, pretty much to the left. But not when I left the university. I quickly got wise. I’d read about what had happened to Russia in 1917 when the Communists took over.

When in doubt, don’t.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.

Trust, but verify.

I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.

It doesn’t take long to become aware of the presence of the CIA in Laos.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!

How much better it would be if all could be more aware of God’s providence and love and express that gratitude to Him.