Philosophical

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim. No matter how abominable your condition may be, try not to blame anything or anybody. The moment you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.

Try to build and treat your vocabulary the way you are to treat your checking account. Pay every attention to it and try to increase your earnings. The purpose is to enable you to articulate yourselves as fully and precisely as possible.

Progress is not a straight line. It's a circle in which we strive to use all our talents and complete ourselves. Potentially, we are all winners.

Equality is the best insurance against the political upheaval that authorities fear. The means are the ends — and vice versa.

I know a better truth than yours. It is larger, roomier, more complex, and more authentic than any you will find in a single formulation or dictum or label or theory.

The hardest thing in the world is to see what is actually in front of you, unmediated by your own expectations, theories, and wishes about what should be there.

That choice, between the devil and the dream, comes up every day in different little disguises. I'm sure it comes up in every field of endeavor and every life.

This attitude of opposition is not justified as a strategy, as a means to an end, a way of changing the world. It is, rather, the best way of being in the world.

To think for yourself — not narrowly, but rather as a mind — you must be able to talk to yourself: well, openly, and at length.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

The right to protest exists to protect the powerless from the powerful. When protest itself becomes a form of power, it must be exercised with the same responsibility we demand of all power.