“Vengeance is not the point: change is.”

Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.

Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.

We cannot live without our lives

People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.

To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.

Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.

Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.

Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try – by punishing the troublesome – to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.

There should be no censorship of mail.

The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.

The free man must be born before freedom can be won, and the brotherly man must be born before full brotherhood can be won. It will come into being only if we build it out of our very muscle and bone – by trying to act it out.

I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision. . . is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive.

Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.

there is clearly a kind of anger that is healthy. It is the concentration of one’s whole being in the determination: this must change.

Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.

We believe, in fact, that the one act of respect has little force unless matched by the other – in balance with it… The acting out of that dual respect I would name as precisely the source of our power.

When there is no more separation between ‘this’ and ‘that,’ it is called the still-point of the Tao. At the still point in the center of the circle one can see the infinite in all things.

Everything is written in my mind, more so due to my lack of vision at this point. After years of vigorous writing, it was more of a challenge to do it without paper or sidekicks. I enjoy a good challenge.

The knowledge of the ancients reached the highest point-the time before anything existed. This is the highest point. It is exhaustive. There is no adding to it.

At some point you’re gonna have to take a chance on something.

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

If I’m not pointing people to Jesus then I’m wasting my life.

My point is I’m kind of an outlier. For whatever reason, the success still blows my mind – that I’m able to talk to people about the music I’ve written.

In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out.