Authors From The United States

"Lying is about controlling someone else’s reality, hoping that what they don’t know won’t hurt you."

"Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments."

"The success of a relationship should be measured by its depth, not by its length."

"There’s no better place to hide from intimacy than in a relationship."

"Trust is a chain that gets longer the less you pull on it."

"A life is just one letter away from a lie."

"Love is not an accident. It is a delicate union of two complex, complementary puzzle pieces that have inadvertently been created by different manufacturers."

"They say love is blind, but it’s trauma that’s blind. Love sees what is."

"Only when our love for someone exceeds our need for them do we have a shot at a genuine relationship together."

"We make fun of those we're most scared of becoming."

"Nature knows no tragedies or catastrophes. It knows no good or evil. It knows only creation and destruction. and one can never truly be happy and free, in the way we were as children before learning of our mortality, without at some point confronting our destruction. And all we can ask for, all we can hope for, all we can beseech God for, is to win a few battles in a war we will ultimately lose."

"A lot of people make the mistake of trying to defend principles in relationships. My goal is long-term happiness. And I make choices that aren’t going to undermine that goal."

"The natural instincts of men seem to be to alternate between periods of love relationships and periods of hedonistic bachelorhood, with some traumatized kids thrown in as an evolutionary imperative."

"What most of us present to the world isn’t necessarily our true self: It’s a combination of years of bad habits and fear-based behavior. Our real self lies buried underneath all the insecurities and inhibitions. So rather than just being yourself, focus on discovering and permanently bringing to the surface your best self."

"Love is a velvet prison."

"Most guys who define themselves as "too nice" only behave nicely because they want everybody to like them and don’t want anyone to think badly of them. Don’t mistake being fearful and weak-minded for being nice."

"The ignorant are not blissful; they are the butt of a joke they're not even aware of."

"If you possess the ability to learn from your mistakes, then failure is literally impossible, because each rejection brings you closer to perfection."

"Every adventure to be had in this room is on the dark side. The people on the light side are asleep right now. And they are dreaming about the dark side. Because the more you try to repress the dark side, the stronger it gets, until it finds its own way to the surface. I sleep well. I dream of angels and sponge cake and panda bears. I don’t see the dark side until I open my eyes."

"The great thing about the heart is that it has no master, despite what reason may think."

"We have this idea that love is supposed to last forever. But love isn't like that. It's a free-flowing energy that comes and goes when it pleases. Sometimes it stays for life; other times it stays for a second, a day, a month, or a year. So don't fear love when it comes simply because it makes you vulnerable. But don't be surprised when it leaves, either. Just be glad you had the opportunity to experience it."

"Men are not dogs. We merely think we are and, on occasion, act as if we are. But, by believing in our nobler nature, women have the amazing power to inspire us to live up to it."

"To get a woman, you have to be willing to risk losing her."

"In order to excel at anything, there are always hurdles, obstacles, or challenges one must get past. It's what bodybuilders call the pain period. Those who push themselves, and are willing to face pain, exhaustion, humiliation, rejection, or worse, are the ones who become champions. The rest are left on the sidelines."

"In life, people tend to wait for good things to come to them. And by waiting, they miss out. Usually, what you wish for doesn't fall in your lap; it falls somewhere nearby, and you have to recognize it, stand up, and put in the time and work it takes to get to it. This isn't because the universe is cruel. It's because the universe is smart. It has its own cat-string theory and knows we don't appreciate things that fall into our laps."

"A man has two primary drives in early adulthood: one toward power, success, and accomplishment; the other toward love, companionship, and sex. Half of life then was out of order. To go before them was to stand up as a man and admit that I was only half a man."

"This book was dictated to Benoni B. Gattell at intervals between the years 1912 and 1932. Since then it has been worked over again and again. Now, in 1946, there are few pages that have not been at least slightly changed."

"Because Thinking and Destiny is so rich with inspired information, most of which requires extensive study, I have prepared The Path to introduce readers to those concepts in Percival’s book which are the easiest to comprehend. These are taken directly from Thinking and Destiny, most of the statements in this book being in Percival’s own words. It is essential that all men and women become aware of what they are, why they are here on Earth and what they must do to preserve civilization before it is too late. I believe that the beginning of this awareness can be found in The Path."

"For you it is possible to do anything; the only thing impossible for you to do is to do wrong, inasmuch as you are knowledge and justice and love."

"In every age a few individuals do find The Great Way. They do conquer death by regenerating and restoring their bodies to the Realm of Permanence."

"From November of 1892 I passed through astonishing and crucial experiences, following which, in the spring of 1893, there occurred the most extraordinary event of my life. I had crossed 14th Street at 4th Avenue, in New York City. Cars and people were hurrying by. While stepping up to the northeast corner curbstone, Light, greater than that of myriads of suns opened in the center of my head. In that instant or point, eternities were apprehended. There was no time. Distance and dimensions were not in evidence."

"I do not presume to preach to anyone; I do not consider myself a preacher or a teacher. Were it not that I am responsible for the book, I would prefer that my personality be not named as its author. The greatness of the subjects about which I offer information, relieves and frees me from self-conceit and forbids the plea of modesty."

"Consciousness is the ultimate Reality; compared with it, all else is illusion."

"Yes, there is a Government of this changing world. The Government is not in the changing world. It is in the Realm of Permanence, and though the Realm of Permanence pervades this world of change, it cannot be seen by mortal eyes."

"Therefore public officials in monarchies, oligarchies and democracies, are as bad as they are. They are the representatives of the people; in them the thoughts of the people have taken form. Those who are not in office would do as the present officials do, or even worse, if they had the opportunity. Corrupt officials can hold office and sinecures only so long as the thoughts of the people are depraved."

"A thought has no size in the physical sense but is vast as compared to the physical acts and objects into which it is later precipitated. The power of a thought is enormous and superior to all the successive physical acts, objects, and events that body forth its energy. A thought often endures for a time much greater than the whole life of the man who thought it."

"Accidents and chance are words used by persons who do not think clearly when they attempt to account for certain happenings. Anyone who thinks must be convinced that in a world as orderly as this there is no room for the words accident and chance."

"This is the law: Every thing existing on the physical plane is an exteriorization of thought, which must be balanced through the one who issued the thought, and in accordance with that one’s responsibility, at the conjunction of time, condition, and place."

"You will not be, you cannot be, satisfied with anything less than Self-knowledge. You, as feeling-and-desire, are the responsible doer of your Triune Self; from what you have made for yourself as your destiny you must learn two great lessons which all experiences of life are to teach. These lessons are:"

"Self-destructive addiction is merely the medium for desperate people to internalize their frustration, resistance, and powerlessness. In other words, we can safely ignore the drug hysteria that periodically sweeps through the United States. Instead we should focus our ethical concerns and political energies on the contradictions posed by the persistence of inner-city poverty in the midst of extraordinary opulence. In the same vein, we need to recognize and dismantle the class- and ethnic-based apartheids that riddle the U.S. landscape."

"The hawks favored an air strike to eliminate the Cuban missile bases. The doves opposed the air strike and favored a blockade."

"Around the country, ideas that originated on the hard right or in the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists are finding their way into the mainstream. In a number of cases, these ideas have become commonplace in American minds."

"You can go to any major history and see the effect of unregulation. The very point of developing regulation around industrial society was that they were not only exploiting the workers to death they were befouling the planet, so regulation came because of that. What the right wing wants is for the public to have this role in the societal debate over balance of these issues and no power. The public power to confront these errors of industry is government regulation."

"Berlet is professional political hit man whose specialty is smearing anyone outside the traditional left-right categories as an extremist, at best, and a nascent Nazi at worst. He and his organization have been a veritable fountainhead of anti-Fulani material, which details the political history of Fulani and her group from a leftist perspective. In Berlet’s view, Fulani endorsing Buchanan is a betrayal of leftist principles, a sell-out that does not augur well for the left."

"Berlet is really saying that he loves the plutocrats and considers any expose of their crimes to be a fascist conspiracy."

"The political Right currently runs the country. That's very annoying, but pretending it isn't true is foolhardy. What is really annoying is that in the late 1970s some of us were giving speeches and writing articles explaining that rightists intended to take over the country. It wasn't hard to figure that out, since at the same time right-wing ideologues and strategists were also giving speeches and writing articles describing in elaborate detail how they planned to do it. Well, they did it."

"Today, there are still political and social networks that seek to undermine full equality for all Americans. Their messages are spread using the standard tools: prejudice, fear, disdain, misinformation, trivialization, patronizing stereotypes, demonization and even scare-mongering conspiracy theories. While many of the groups within these networks describe themselves as mainstream — and many disagree with one another — they all have helped spread bigoted ideas into American life."

"There's a golden thread connecting everything we do - it strings the days together and is easily seen when we look back at where we've been. I always thought the thread was purpose - a self-defining core - but I was wrong. When I look back now...all I see is love."

"Be aware that you may not be the best judge of what your employees need to do their jobs effectively. Even if you've done the job yourself, someone else may work best with a different set of tools, or in a different setup, because each person is different."

"People I read a lot to my son were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems."