The following are brief quotes loosely organized into the categories: Education, Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Science and Spiritual.
Education
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
Franklin
[Government] education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another.
John Stuart Mill
To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society!
T. Roosevelt
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Mark Twain
Economics
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Keynes
Freedom’s only true defense is sound money…
Denning
No one ever lost money by taking a profit.
Rogers
The purpose of business is not to make money but to serve its customers so well that it is profitable.
Unknown
The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.
Thatcher
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
Galbraith
In a free market without government privilege, people seeking profit are led as if by an invisible hand to create general benefits that may be unintended.
Adam Smith
It is [an] underlying confusion between wealth and debt which has made such a tragedy of the [current] era.
Soddy
If printing money made you rich, Zimbabwe would be the richest county on the planet.
John Key
…economists are most economical about ideas. They make the ones they learned in graduate school last a lifetime.
Galbraith
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it is just the opposite.
Galbraith
Philosophy
Words are like bullets in truth’s bandoleer, and poets are truth’s snipers.
Wu
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
King
The supreme sloth consists in failing to long madly for immortality.
Unamuno
Optimism is a duty!
Popper
What do you care what other people think?
Feynman
The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.
Popper
Evil is the complete absence of empathy.
Unknown
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.
Mencken
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
Schopenhauer
I’ve seen a heap of trouble in my life, and most of it never came to pass.
Twain
History doesn’t repeat — but sometimes it rhymes.
Twain
David
Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith.
Durant
Preparation is temporary, regret is forever.
Curry
We are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating
Banks
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony
Mahatma Gandhi
Those who fear Hell follow a religious path, those who have already been there follow a spiritual path.
Unknown
I feel much better now that I’ve given up hope.
Center
Your point of power is always in the present.
Seth
As long as you believe in some Truth, you do not believe in yourself.
Stiner
We are not physical beings who have temporary spiritual experiences but rather spiritual beings who have temporary physical experiences.
Unknown
Trying to be compassionate is like trying to be spontaneous.
Beck
Worrying is praying for something that you don’t want.
Bhagavan Das
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true, the other is to refuse to believe what is true.
Kirkegaard
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.
Twain
Skeptic: Someone who doubts everything including his own skepticism.
Bengston
Pseudo-Skeptic: Someone who exercises a set of prejudgments against anything that varies from the conventionally accepted, especially in the face of data to the contrary.
Center
Dialogue: A free flow of meaning between people in communication.
Bohm
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Pascal
One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.
Tolstoy
The recipe for perpetual ignorance is to be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.
Elbert Hubbard
You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.
Maya Angelou
Being free is being able to accept people for what they are.
Maya Angelou
Courage is contagious. Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver.
Brene Brown
When we use dehumanizing language, it says much more about us than the people that we’re railing against and it chips away at our soul.
Brene Brown
Political
Legislation… is the chief instrument of oppression.
Hayek
No government can in any way expand its powers over people but to limit freedom…
Unknown
If government cannot be limited, freedom is lost…
Garret
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force…It is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
Washington
The tragic flaw in political parties is that they attract politicians.
Center
Political correctness is to religious orthodoxy as insensitivity is to heresy.
Center
Bureaucrats are individuals adept at aggregating small solvable problems into large unsolvable problems.
Center
A constitution is to…government, what law is to individuals.
Nelson
Democrats tax and spend, Republicans borrow and spend, libertarians are frugal.
Center
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal.
Brandeis
There is nothing so bad that government can’t make it worse.
Russell
Opinion polls are a symptom of mobocracy.
Unknown
Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
Jefferson
Freedom is the length of the chain between your imagination and reality.
Unknown
The Christian religion is not an implicit part of the American government.
John Adams
A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
Stevenson
Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit,
O’Rourk
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Mencken
Those who control history have leverage on the future.
Center
You can never be certain that something will happen until the government denies it.
Sir Humphrey
The top 5% pay 59% of income taxes and the bottom 50% pay 2.7% of income taxes.
IRS
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson
I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in belief that they have known something of what has been passing in their times.
Jefferson
The United States of America have only one permanent criminal class, members of the U.S. Congress.
Twain
Never assumes the rules are what you think they are just because they are written down, if someone else can change them.
Mauldin
Ideology is the science of idiots.
Hamilton
Watching Republicans and the Democrats bickering over the U.S. debt is like watching two drunks argue over a bar tab on the Titanic.
Unknown
I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare and I dare a little more as I grow older.
Montaigne
American politics has clearly demonstrated that you can indeed fool most of the people most of the time.
Center
Bipartisanship is alive and well as evidenced by the cooperative effort to bankrupt the country.
Unknown
Politics is not the art of the possible. It is choosing between the unpalatable and the disastrous.
Galbraith
An election is the advance auction of stolen goods.
Mencken
Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the Government take care of him; better take a closer look at the American Indian.
Ford
Libertarianism: A conspiracy to take over the government and leave you alone.
Unknown
Mandatory health insurance is older people mandating that younger people pay for their health care.
Dent
Changing the politician occupying an office is analogous to changing the font on a menu.
Tim O’Reilly
Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
Mussolini
America is slowly discovering that the land of the free and home of the brave has become a corporate, fascist nightmare.
Chapman
There’s no question that this is a time when corporations have taken over the basic process of governing.
Galbraith
Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.
Hoover
When masses are raised above the individual,individuals suffer en masse.
Peters
Freedom consists of the distribution of power and despotism consists in its concentration.
Lord Acton
Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) cultures.
Unknown
The political establishment — proven wrong time and time again — thinks it know what its doing.
Rachel Riederer
I think that the federal government — just as an entertainment medium — is pretty good.
Dave Barry
Psychology
It is not so much what a man is that counts as it is what he ventures to make of himself.
Kelly
Behavior can be understood only by identifying the goals to which it is addressed.
Carver
There is no reason to expect anyone to think better of you than you think of yourself.
Center
Intelligence: The extent to which one can learn from experience.
Maturity: The extent to which one can learn from other people’s experience.
Center
The true test of character is power.
Center
Life is a task. You either cope with it or it gets you.
Szasz
True personal power is not the ability to cause change but the ability to inspire
others.
Ryerson
Nature loves variety. Unfortunately, society hates it.
Diamond
When we have knowledge, space grants us unbounded opportunity, and time presents us with infinite possibilities for change.
Manjurshri
[People] try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds.
Rice
People only accept change when they are faced with necessity, and only recognize necessity when a crisis is upon them.
Jean Monnet
Only insight can change the workings of a disordered mind.
Pearce
You create your own illusion and become entangled in it.
Pearce
Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
Galbraith
Our judgments of any person [including self], event, thing, or set of circumstances are cloaked self-judgments.
Schwartz
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Viktor Frankl
Science
We can well believe that we will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.
Wheeler
Specialization is for insects.
Long
Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.
Einstein
Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve.
Yudkowsky
The most important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
DuBois
Involuntary death is a cornerstone of biological evolution, but that fact does not make it a good thing.
Anissimov
Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that people don’t have to experience it.
Frisch
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Hitchens
If it s obvious, it s obviously wrong.
Granville
Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.
Einstein
Mainstream medicine isn’t about healing but about enabling patients to continue dysfunctional life styles.
Anonymous Physician
The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.
Sir James Jeans
Extraordinary breakthroughs in science always involve giving up a significant prejudice.
Dirac
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Einstein
At it’s best, it [science] is completely open and excludes nothing. It has no entrance requirements.
Maslow
The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
Herbert
You can recognize a pioneer by the arrows in his back.
Rubik
There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.
Einstein
Through modern physics materialism has transcended itself.
Popper
Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.
Einstein
I refuse to commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.
Carl Jung
All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force…we must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.
Max Planck
Spiritual
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
Buddha
The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.
Einstein
Fear is a mirror reminding you of where ego is still present.
Aaron
Words are unnecessary stains on silence and emptiness.
Beckett
Your purpose is to be Present with as much compassion, wisdom and skillfulness as is possible.
Aaron
…the intellect (consciousness) and matter are correlatives…they are in fact really one and the same thing, considered from two opposite points of view.
Schopenhauer
Enlightenment is an awareness, through direct experience, of one’s unity with All That Is.
Center
Enlightenment is a direct experience of the superposition of all dualistic systems thereby revealing their undifferentiated origin.
Center
God will not drive flies away from a tailless cow.
Fulani tribe saying
Your way of being in the world determines the reality you experience.
Center
If you don’t create your own reality someone else will
Chopra
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.
Planck
You can’t start the next chapter of your life, if you keep re-reading the last one.
Davis
So long as it “feels” like there are choices, its important for us to make skillful ones.
Davis
Mind cannot bring you to the direct knowledge of Self.
O’Keeffe
Ultimately, your greatest teacher is to live with an open heart.
Emmanuel
Thought is a tool to take you to the gate. Then you must leave your tools behind.
Emmanuel
Trust that nothing good that you offer into the universe is ever wasted.
Aaron
Prayer is extroverted and seeks to humble the ego,
Meditation is introverted and seeks to transcend the ego.
Esmann
Language conceals the Self.
Esmann
Read a little, meditate more and think of God all the time.
Paramahana Yogananda
The ego is like a black bug on a black rock on a moonless night.
Kadir
The way we live ordinary life is [our] spiritual practice.
Moss
[Once] you experience something, you do not have to believe in it any longer. It is not a matter of belief but a matter of experience.
Fox
The trap is to believe enlightenment is an experience.
Schlosser
For the religious person God excites the mind; for the mystic God stops it.
Moss
Don’t believe everything you think.
Aaron
Forgiveness means forgiveness of one’s self for insisting on replacing Reality with your version of it.
Hammer
You must allow the world to be as the world is.
Hammer
Experience is fundamentally an emotional attachment to physicality that exists to be transcended.
Center
Ego’s resistance to Being blocks Self-realization.
Center
Unconditional Love dissolves the attachment of ego to judgment.
Center
Therapy attempts to modify the ego, the natural mind transcends the ego.
Center
Presence and kindness are the tools with which we find freedom.
Aaron
Awareness precedes memory, memory precedes thought, thought precedes language and language precedes narration — peel the onion.
Center
Belief in God is the greatest obstacle to knowing God.
Jacobson
Religions must fail simply because mind cannot practice the truth of Being.
Jacobson
Don’t mistake knowledge for knowing.
Zen saying
If you believe in an entity that you call God, chances are God is just a character in the script you “wrote” to articulate your life.
Center
Abide in Presence.
Center
A change in meaning is a change in being.
Bohm
Beliefs, opinions and judgments are three of the many flavors of mental chewing gum — kick the habit.
Center
No path can take you to your true Self because you already are your true Self.
Jaxon-Bear
Ignorance is grounded in beliefs.
Spira
Meditation — Presence on training wheels.
Center
Not mindfulness but mindlessness.
Center
Compulsive thinking is cognitive avoidance of being Present.
Center
Ego is the mask God wears while pretending to be you.
Center
Awakening is the realization that one is merely a character in a cosmic soap opera.
Center
Idle thoughts arising in awareness have the same status as tactile sensations, sounds, smells or images arising in awareness — endless flux.
Center
To be Present focus attention on awareness.
Center
You are Love’s body.
Center
Pursuit of experience is avoidance of Presence.
Center
Seeking enlightenment is a spiritual snipe hunt.
Center
Cosmic Love is absolutely Ruthless and Highly Indifferent: it teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or not.
Lilly
ALL That Is emanates from Divine Love, Surrender to love and be one with ALL That Is.
Center
Is this enlightenment we are promising you? As long as you are seeking it, no. When you are being it, it is done.
Paul Selig
You cannot be the light and hold another in darkness.
Paul Selig
Being trumps doing.
Center
In the long run it is far more dangerous to adhere to illusion than to face what the actual fact is.
Bohm