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Also the principle of stress, so often invoked in psychology, psychiatry, and psychosomatics, needs some reevaluation. As everything in the world, stress too is an ambivalent thing. Stress is not only a danger to life to be controlled and neutralized by adaptive mechanisms; it also creates higher life.
 
There are risks and costs to action, but they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.
 
There's no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.
 
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
 
There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.
 
Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.
 
World belongs to humanity, not this leader, that leader or that king or prince or religious leader. World belongs to humanity.
 
Don't ever mistake my silence for ignorance, my calmness for acceptance or my kindness for weakness. Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength.
 
We are simultaneously the performers and the audience of our own lives.
 
Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
 
Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.
 
What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.
 
Happiness is a state of mind.
 
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. 
 
COMMITTEE: A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary.
 
You've got to have a map: to know where you came from, where you are, where you want to be, and how to get there.
 
Lord save me from your followers
 
We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc. That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.'... And so on. But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time....Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker. It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i. e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions).
 
I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'
 
There are many difficulties impeding the rapid spread of reasonableness. One of the main difficulties is that it always takes two to make a discussion reasonable. Each of the parties must be ready to learn from the other. You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you.
 
2725 quotes