It's been awhile, but here is another batch of some of my favorite quotes. To see all of them, follow this link. “Christianity: Because you’re so awful you made God kill himself.” Anon on Facebook "The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair." H. L. Mencken “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.” Albert Einstein “When you get to be our age, you all of a sudden realize that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with,” noted the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. “You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school." “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not the hate them, but to understand them.” Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, 1676. “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” – Benjamin Franklin “The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.” Robert Swann "When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900). "Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like". Justice William O. Douglas: “Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publication, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ... Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. ... fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes in the land.” Justice William O. Douglas: "It's just an accident that we happen to be on earth, enjoying our silly little moments, distracting ourselves as often as possible so we don't have to really face up to the fact that, you know, we're just temporary people with a very short time in a universe that will eventually be completely gone. And everything that you value, whether it's Shakespeare, Beethoven, da Vinci, or whatever, will be gone. The earth will be gone. The sun will be gone. There'll be nothing. The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself. A guy will say, "Well, I make my luck." And the same guy walks down the street and a piano that's been hoisted drops on his head. The truth of the matter is your life is very much out of your control." Woody Allen “The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.” Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881) “The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.” Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist, Nobel laureate (1899-1961) “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Galileo Galilei

A friend recently suggested Pema Chödrön as an insightful writer on issues of mindfulness and self-awareness. I was not disappointed. Here are some of my favorites: “The only reason we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes. ” “If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.” “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth” “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.” “A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us. ” “The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. . . Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there's some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. . . Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.” “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”

You can look the other way once, and it's no big deal, except it makes it easier for you to compromise the next time, and pretty soon that's all you're doing; compromising, because that's the way you think things are done. You know those guys I busted? You think they were the bad guys? Because they weren't, they weren't bad guys, they were just like you and me. Except they compromised... Once.