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People Quotes - Part 1
 8.5 “Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.”
“This is a mournful discovery. 1)Those who agree with you are insane 2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.” “There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you’re lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.” “The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.” Felipe Unger's rating:
 
8 “Just because somebody’s dead, you don’t just stop liking them, for God’s sake- especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that’re alive and all.”
“If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the “Fuck you” signs in the world. It’s impossible.” “I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It’s nice.” “That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose.” “I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.” "I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect." “She was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls, if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hands all the time, as if they were afraid they’d bore you or something. Jane was different. We’d get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we’d start holding hands, and we wouldn’t quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a big deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.” Felipe Unger's rating:
 
8.4 “I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
8.8 “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
“From a certain point onward, there is no turning back. That is the point that must be reached.” 
8.4 “It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.”
"To get something important, people have to pay a price. That’s the rule the world operates by." "I’m not after a strength that’ll repel power coming from the outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that outside power. To stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things — unfairness, misfortune, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings." “You don’t have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.” "Only by learning the truth—whatever that truth might be—could people be given the right kind of power." “If you miss the bus, miss the train, you’d be left behind. So everyone says, let’s get on the train, let’s get on the bus and go faster and get rich… I just didn’t like that kind of lifestyle. I love to read books, to listen to music.” “Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in flight, searching the skies for dreams.” “I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I’m in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.” “I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.” “Even if we could turn back, we’d probably never end up where we started.” "It’s not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There’s shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does. And to acquire a healthy intelligence takes a certain amount of time and effort." “I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. Some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.” “You lost all interest in this world. You were disappointed and discouraged, and lost interest in everything. So you abandoned your physical body. You went to a world apart and you’re living a different kind of life there. In a world that’s inside you.” “But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.” “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” “If you only read the books that everyone else is thinking, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” “People’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far the maintenance of life is concerned. They are all just fuel. Advertising filler in the news paper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills; when you feed them to fire, they are just paper. The fire isn’t thinking ‘oh This is Kant’ or ‘Oh This is Yomuri evening edition’ or ‘Nice tits’, while it burns. To the fire, they are nothing but scraps of paper. It is the exact same thing. Important memories , not-so-important memories, totally useless memories : there is no distinction — they are all just fuel.” “No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.” “Letters are just pieces of paper… Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.” “But who can say what’s best? That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.” “In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.” “I’m finished as a human being,” she said. “All you’re looking at is the lingering memory of what I used to be. The most important part of me, what used to be inside, died years ago, and I’m just functioning by auto-memory.” “Deep rivers run quiet.” “Look at the rain long enough , with no thoughts in your head , and you gradually feel your body falling loose , shaking free of the world of reality . Rain has the power to hypnotize.” “What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for — and to do it so unconsciously.” “When something bothered me, I didn’t talk with anyone about it. I thought it over all by myself, came to a conclusion, and took action alone. Not that I really felt lonely. I thought that’s just the way things are. Human beings, in the final analysis, have to survive on their own.” Felipe Unger's rating:
 
10 “We must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”
8 “When things go badly, and the rations are reduced, the grounded do-dos will clamor again for their wings… The young people who now think so poorly of democracy may grow up to be fighters for freedom. The cry of ‘Give me television and hamburgers, but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty,’ may give place, under altered circumstances to the cry of Give me liberty or give me death.”
“We prefer to do things comfortably. But I don’t want comfort… I want poetry. I want danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin.” “Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth.” “A man can smile, and smile, and be a villain.” “Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses.” “My dear young friend. Civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that’s what soma is.” “In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” “In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual….Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man’s biological nature.” Felipe Unger's rating:
7.6 “When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”
“When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life. Have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around that you call life was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.” Felipe Unger's rating:
10 “Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.”
“Stand up for what you believe in even if you are standing alone” “The real damage is done by those millions who want to “survive.” The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes.Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves — or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe? From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.” “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.” “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” Felipe Unger's rating:
 
8 “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
8 “Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.”
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” “I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's; I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.” “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.” “What is now proven was once only imagined.” Felipe Unger's rating:
8.5 "Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will"
“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” “The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.” “We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.” “Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequences. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness but it is greatness.” “We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.” “My reputation grows with every failure.” “As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.” "All censorship exists to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship." “A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.” “My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.” “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Felipe Unger's rating:
7.5 “Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.”
8.4 “Before you act, listen. Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try.”
“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.” “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.” “We’re stronger in the places that we’ve been broken.” “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” 
8.8 “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
“Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, ‘I will simply be.’” “It’s not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” “In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.” “As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them” “Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.” Felipe Unger's rating:
5 “John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. Nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by their adaptation to change.”
8.7 “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
8.4 “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
9 “They have pillaged the world. When the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything, they scour the sea. If an enemy is rich, they are greedy; if he is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their appetite. They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and poverty with equal craving. They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it by the lying name of “empire.” They make a desert and call it “peace”.”
8.6 “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
Felipe Unger's rating:
9.1 “What we see is not made up of what we are seeing but rather from what we are.”
“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.” “Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quiet valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.” 
8.6 “Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.”
“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.” “Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.” “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” “When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.” “There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.” 
7 “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”
7.2 “Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man’s brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn’t understand you at all.”
9 “It [the web] is not a technology that favours freedom of speech. It is not a technology that favours human rights. It is not a technology that favours civil life. Rather it is a technology that can be used to set up a totalitarian spying regime, the likes of which we have never seen. Or, on the other hand, taken by us, taken by activists, and taken by all those who want a different trajectory for the technological world, it can be something we all hope for.”
“If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.” “We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work.” “What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I’m a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.” Felipe Unger's rating:
8.2 “The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess then, we may learn: 1st, Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action ... 2nd, Circumspection, which surveys the whole Chess-board, or scene of action: - the relation of the several Pieces, and their situations; ... 3rd, Caution, not to make our moves too hastily...”
Felipe Unger's rating:
8.4 “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy”
“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. “But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. “Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” MLK, 1967 Felipe Unger's rating:
8.2 “The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.”
6 “Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.”
8.7 “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.” 
8.5 “A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there. With enough effort, he may achieve it. Or he may find something that is even more rewarding. But in the end, no matter what the outcome, he will know he has been alive.”
9 “To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
6.6 “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then.”
“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” "On the altar of God, I pledge undying hostility to any government restrictions on the free minds of the people." Felipe Unger's rating:
8.8 “Art is never finished, only abandoned”
“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” 
5.3 “When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.”
"The question isn't who is going to let me, it's who is going to stop me." 
4 “We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes - understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.”
Felipe Unger's rating:
 
7.5 “If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.”
8 “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”
0 “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more “successful” people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.”
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