Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.

Too often we… enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn’t mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you’re addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn’t available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It’s a habit like all habits.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.

Imagine the privilege the Lord has given us of sustaining His prophet, whose counsel will be untainted, unvarnished, unmotivated by any personal aspiration, and utterly true!

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

I believe with all my heart that America remains ‚the great idea‘ that inspires the world. It is a privilege to be born here. It is an honor to become a citizen here. It is a gift to raise your family here, to vote here, and to live here.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

It is with your aid, as the people, that I think we shall be able to preserve – not the country, for the country will preserve itself, but the institutions of the country – those institutions which have made us free, intelligent and happy – the most free, the most intelligent, and the happiest people on the globe.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

I can barely walk, but it’s a privilege to be able to move at all.

If you get to a point where the existing institutions will not bend to the popular will, you have to eliminate the institutions.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.

The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.

Steve Jobs‘ ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

None of us is designed for the role we must assume in a revolutionary society, although Cubans had the privilege of Jose Marti’s example.

Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.

Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world.

The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

Thought can be so seductive and hypnotic that it absorbs your attention totally, so you become your thoughts.

Unless we form the habit of going to the Bible in bright moments as well as in trouble, we cannot fully respond to its consolations because we lack equilibrium between light and darkness.

If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

We believe that according the name ‚investors‘ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‚romantic.‘

The rulers of the state are the only persons who ought to have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.

I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

I received free health care.

The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

Great is the power of habit. It teaches us to bear fatigue and to despise wounds and pain.

The spirit of envy can destroy; it can never build.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

I will only say that many freedom fighters of India found their calling in the institutions of Britain. And many makers of modern India, including several of my distinguished predecessors, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Dr. Manmohan Singh, passed through their doors.

I have always liked running, so it wasn’t particularly difficult to make it a habit. All you need is a pair of running shoes and you can do it anywhere. It does not require anybody to do it with, and so I found the sport perfectly fits me as a person who tends to be independent and individualistic.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

I’m very much a creature of habit.

The food here is terrible, and the portions are too small.

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.

Internet TV and the move to the digital approach is quite revolutionary. TV has historically has been a broadcast medium with everybody picking from a very finite number of channels.