Alan Quotes

A summary of every Jewish holiday: They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat!

Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.

If you don't have the background awareness of oneness, duality becomes real.

I think we have to give religion its due. I think we have to respect those for whom religion is important, but equally respect those who can achieve good morality without religion.

People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.

Keep writing. Try to do a little bit every day, even if the result looks like crap. Getting from page four to page five is more important than spending three weeks getting page four perfect.

Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.

Usability methods are like sandpapering a chair. If you are making a chair, the sandpaper can make it smoother. But no amount of sandpaper will turn a chair into a table.

Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.

The deeper you love yourself, the more the universe will affirm your worth. Then you can enjoy a lifelong love affair that brings you the richest fulfillment from inside out.

The purpose of prayer is not to change God's mind, which always knows your wholeness and your deservingness. The purpose of prayer is to change your mind so you can see through the eyes of God.

We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.

The road to enlightenment is paved with authenticity, not imitation.

Optimism may sometimes be delusional, but pessimism is always delusional.

Shut your noise, you old c***!

The one thing I hate about other managers is waffle that is nowhere near the truth. I would never conduct myself like that.

To think you know what is best for another person is an industrial-strength ego trip.

You give your power away when you make someone or something outside of you more important than what is inside of you.

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

I don't want to stir up a can of worms.

The question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now?

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

I feel like everyone who goes to The University of Texas is blessed and lucky to be there because they're getting a chance to be as good as they can be.

Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.

A gentleman ... sleeps at his work. That's what work's for. Why do you think they have the SILENCE notices in the library? So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.

I support public and private partnerships whenever appropriate in order to achieve our goal of a prosperous and vibrant downtown.

One accusation you can't throw at me is that I've always done my best.

Got more dirt than ball. Here we go again.

The threat or fear of violence should not become an excuse or justification for restricting freedom of speech.

One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.

I want to swim in both directions at once. Desire success, court failure.

I've always juggled a lot of projects because at least half the projects you do get shelved. So you have to do a lot of things in order for things to move forward.

No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.

That was never a penalty in a million planets.

Hard work does not go unnoticed, and someday the rewards will follow.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

In today's distorted world of 'human rights,' truth takes a back seat to ideology, and false claims - especially those that 'support' radical ideologies - persist even after they have been exposed.

Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don't try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it's someone announcing the departure of trains.

Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

I loathe crowds. I especially dont like cities. A city involves biomass. And biomass gets to me.

I'm no good with words but I'll find ways from time to time to show you how grateful I am.

if you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly.

That's where I'm comfortable - playing a jackass on the scene, rolling in with my pocket watch and my buffoon hairdo, with my shoes.

Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.

I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

Originally, theater was my life. It was what I assumed I'd spend my working life doing - if I was lucky. Then along came movies.

School is basically about one point of view - the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view.

There’s no such religious force in the West as powerful as consumerism.