"I’m very aware of that over-application of the trader principle, as if that’s all you need to know to understand human relationships. Good God... [W]ho among you, tell the truth, last time you played with a little kid—or a dog, did you think you’re going to have a trade relationship with the dog later in life, for crying out loud? Because there’s a good analogy there... As a dog-lover, when I’m looking at a dog nose to nose, the trade is happening right now. The interaction is the reward... Anybody who doesn’t understand that, I don’t wish to speak to. My official response to such people: they can go f**k themselves."
Nathaniel Branden
» Nathaniel Branden - all quotes »
Do you know what eternal life is? You think it's everlasting life. But your own theologians will tell you that that is crazy, because everlasting is still within time. It is time perduring forever. Eternal means timeless — no time. The human mind cannot understand that. The human mind can understand time and can deny time. What is timeless is beyond our comprehension. Yet the mystics tell us that eternity is right now. How's that for good news? It is right now. People are so distressed when I tell them to forget their past. They're crazy! Just drop it! When you hear "Repent for your past," realize it's a great religious distraction from waking up. Wake up! That's what repent means. Not "weep for your sins.": Wake up! understand, stop all the crying. Understand! Wake up!
Anthony de Mello
"You don't understand," he said, "who I am or what I am. I'll show you. By Heaven! I'll show you." Then he put his open palm over his face and withdrew it. The centre of his face became a black cavity. "Here," he said. He stepped forward and handed Mrs. Hall something which she, staring at his metamorphosed face, accepted automatically. Then, when she saw what it was, she screamed loudly, dropped it, and staggered back. The nose—it was the stranger's nose! pink and shining—rolled on the floor.
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
If somehow we could snap our fingers and there would no longer be any drugs in the world whatsoever, would there be no more addiction? Would there be no more suffering? Or is it possible that addiction is not really about drugs, that addiction is really about the relationships that human beings form with one another and all sorts of things? That it's about the difference between establishing good relationships and bad relationships? Who is going to be in control? Who is going to say what this relationship should be between ourselves and these plants and chemicals and substances?... Is this a decision that we just put in the hands of government? Is this a decision we put just in the hands of doctors? Just in the hands of the pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco companies, the alcohol companies and all the other corporations that profit off of the production and sale of these things? The true challenge is how do we learn to live with these substances in such a way that they cause the least possible harm and the greatest possible good. What will cause people to wake up and say "Stop?" What will cause people to say, "Enough is enough?" What will cause people to say, "I value my freedom even if that freedom involves a measure of risk?"
Ethan Nadelmann
Mama Rhino cries out loud, his nose is always the issue, every time he wipes his nose, he rips apart the tissue. Friends of the Rhino (2005).
Avner Strauss
Branden, Nathaniel
Brandes, Georg
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