Zingers

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