“People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is – just be a little kinder.”

Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.

Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

No social stability without individual stability.

At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.

All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Dreamlike sequencing is perhaps one of João Gilberto Noll’s most remarkable triumphs in Quiet Creature on the Corner.

It is the dialogue that matters most, not its imagined end. It is the sacred act of inquiry wherein we gently trace the experienced outlines of an ever-greater whole.

And take on the country’s most legendary eating challenges. I’m no competitive eater, just a regular guy with a serious appetite.

Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.

When you start getting into a full-band, democratic context the little things almost immediately get thrown out the window because you don’t think they’re important.

Families, particularly, tend to be the ones that you take the most for granted. They seem to slip under the radar, all those important things – it almost becomes second nature to do so.

Fantasy is so much hotter than reality most of the time.

We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.