cloud of ignorance…

"...That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you... Continue Reading →

come back with self-respect…

"Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old." - Ralph Waldo Emerson *** "It is not length of life, but depth of life." -... Continue Reading →

look upon death…

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning. - Benjamin Franklin (Amazing that Nichiren Daishonin said something very similar to this.  I will try to find the exact statement but need time and I will re-post this quote when I find it.)

true love…x2

"True love should be transformative, a process that amplifies our capacity to cherish not just one person but all people.  It can make us stronger, lift us higher and deepen us as individuals. Only to the extent that one polishes oneself now can one hope to develop wonderful bonds of the heart in the future."... Continue Reading →

suppressing a child’s spontaneity…

“We cannot know the consequences of suppressing a child's spontaneity when he is just beginning to be active. We may even suffocate life itself. That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration. It is like the... Continue Reading →

renew your determination …

Anyone who has ever made a resolution discovers that the strength of that determination fades in time.  The moment you feel that is when you should make a fresh determination. Tell yourselves, "OK! I will start again from now!" If you fall down seven times, get up the eighth. Don't give up when you feel... Continue Reading →

half an ounce of lead shatters my body

What concern to me are humanity, benevolence, modesty, temperance, gentleness, wisdom, piety, so long as half an ounce of lead shatters my body, and I die at twenty in torments unspeakable, surrounded by five or six thousand dead and dying while my eyes, opening for the last time, see the town I was born in... Continue Reading →

without individual responsibility…

"The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun."  -Ralph Nader *** "The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use... Continue Reading →

oligarchy spares no pains…

“The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.” — Michael Lind, To Have... Continue Reading →

we live in oppressive times…

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder "censorship," we call it "concern for commercial viability." - David Mamet "We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign... Continue Reading →

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