“It is the sounds and smells and sights of places which haunt us and against which we often measure our present.”

A place is a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings.

The catalyst that converts any physical location – any environment if you will – into a place, is the process of experiencing deeply.

Viewed simply as a life-support system, the earth is an environment.

We are homesick for places, we are reminded of places.

Viewed as a resource that sustains our humanity, the earth is a collection of places.

The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

Tantra is the hot blood of spiritual practice. It smashes the taboo against unreasonable happiness; a thunderbolt path, swift, joyful, and fierce. There is no authentic Tantra without profound commitment, discipline, courage, and a sense of wild, foolhardy, fearless abandon.

So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed.

There’s always a backlash against progressive ideas.

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, “This is me and the world be damned!” Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society – Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.