The educational system is pretty much geared to passing the next exam. You're educated to pass tests and not to understand.

Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can't afford the time to think.

The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.

That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

If you want to control a population... give them a God to worship.

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

The greatest choices are great love, great life and great deeds.

The way I’d put it, ” said Makin, “is that Rike can’t make an omelet without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.

How little do they see what really is, who frame their hasty judgment upon that which seems.

I firmly believe there are books whose greatness actually enable you to live.

When the lights come on inside of you, everyone in the world can see a little better.

Nothing walks the earth more savage than a mare enraged.

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

It is not the Head but the Heart that is the Seat of Atheism.

most people lose the ability to see silver linings or even though they are always there above us.

At the museum a troubled woman destroys a sand painting meticulously created over days by Tibetan monks. The monks are not disturbed. The work is a meditation. They simply begin again.