Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

Know that any and all thoughts that you have regarding your own skills, interests, and inclinations are valid. To reinforce the validity of your thoughts, keep them private. Tell yourself that they’re between you and God.

As a single withered tree, if set aflame, causes a whole forest to burn, so does a rascal son destroy a whole family.

I’ve been to those places where it’s ‚poor, pitiful me.‘

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

It’s hard to be clear about who you are when you are carrying around a bunch of baggage from the past. I’ve learned to let go and move more quickly into the next place.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

I never knew a more presumptuous person than myself. The fact that I say that shows that what I say is true.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

I think I have a dualistic nature.

I definitely connected to the fact that life gets out of control and you end up doing things and wishing you were doing other things instead.

Instead of blaming everyone and everything else for your problems, pray for God to help you take an inventory of what’s been on your mind so you can think about what you’ve been thinking about.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

Don’t wait for the last judgment – it takes place every day.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

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

Never take anything for granted.

Sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection.

Sometimes, I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.

I don’t think anything about a personal legacy. I mean, those words would never come out of my mouth unless I just repeated them. Those things have never been important to me.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

But if you – if what – the reports are true, what they’re saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that.

In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

How does a nice Catholic girl end up going to prison for a year? It’s crazy. I’ve made mistakes. I have to pay for those mistakes.

I’ve learned a lot since I was a new mother. My approach to struggle and shame now is to talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you love and reach out to tell your story.

I don’t have all the answers.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

Don’t ever forget two things I’m going to tell you. One, don’t believe everything that’s written about you. Two, don’t pick up too many checks.

I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.

Nobody knows me.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

I need to keep working on myself for a while.

When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure 24-year-old girl.

Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don’t always agree with them.

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.

I have long understood that losing always comes with the territory when you wander into the gambling business, just as getting crippled for life is an acceptable risk in the linebacker business. They both are extremely violent sports, and pain is part of the bargain. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, or even worse.

Almost half of the population of the world lives in rural regions and mostly in a state of poverty. Such inequalities in human development have been one of the primary reasons for unrest and, in some parts of the world, even violence.

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.

From my childhood I had been intended for the clergy. This prospect hung like a dark cloud on my mind.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

I’m super self-critical, which I think is good, because then I get exactly what I want. I’m critical of other people, too – I try not to be, though.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

Well before September 11, it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil.

I might talk about killing people, but that doesn’t mean I do it.

In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence. It is also a course of action that strikes a blow against the regime of international order, but which offers the weak at least some protection from predatory states.

While you’re saving your face, you’re losing your ass.