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“Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.”

“Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.”

“GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.”

“Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness. They are more willing to follow their own vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Unexplored places do not frighten them- or not, at any rate, as much as they frighten those around them. This is one of the secrets of their power. That which we call genius has a great deal to do with courage and daring, a great deal to do with nerve.”

“There are two kinds of success. One is the rare kind that comes to the person who has the power to do what no one else has the power to do. That is genius. But the average person who wins what we call success is not a genius. That person is a man or woman who has merely the ordinary qualities that they share with their fellows, but has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree.”

“Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes.... Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.”

“Suppose a person entering a house were to feel heat on the porch, and going further, were to feel the heat increasing, the more they penetrated within. Doubtless, such a person would believe there was a fire in the house, even though they did not see the fire that must be causing all this heat. A similar thing will happen to anyone who considers this world in detail: one will observe that all things are arranged according to their degrees of beauty and excellence, and that the nearer they are to God, the more beautiful and better they are.”

“The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.”

“My opinion is that we have, in the person of Da Free John, a Spiritual Master and religious genius of the ultimate degree. I assure you I do not mean that lightly. I am not tossing out high-powered phrases to 'hype' the works of Da Free John. I am simply offering to you my own considered opinion: Da Free John's teaching is, I believe, unsurpassed by that of any other spiritual Hero, of any period, of any place, of any time, of any persuasion.”

“Some people have a knack, for example, of being able to tell when someone's lying to them. They may not know what the truth is, but they can tell when someone is trying to lead them astray or sell them something shady. I think he had that ability to an amazing degree. I also think he thought, without saying it explicitly, that you can convince a crowd of something that's not true more easily than you can one person at a time.”

“By right, as the word is employed in this subject, has always been understood discretion, that is, a full and complete power of either doing a thing or omitting it, without the person's becoming liable to animadversion or censure from another, that is, in other words, without his incurring any degree of turpitude or guilt. Now in this sense I affirm that man has no rights, no discretionary power whatever.”

“Mysticism, according to its historical and psychological definitions, is the direct intuition or experience of God; and a mystic is a person who has, to a greater or less degree, such a direct experience -- one whose religion and life are centered, not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that which the person regards as first hand personal knowledge.”

“Superstition, in all times and among all nations, is the fear of a spirit whose passions are those of a man, whose acts are the acts of a man; who is present in some places, not in others; who makes no places holy and not others; who is kind to one person, unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse to him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrifice of a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. This, whatever form of faith it colors, is the essence of superstition.”

“Surely no man can reflect, without wonder upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life.”

“The average person might articulate them differently, but we all think about interpersonal relationships in one way or another. Writers just express that in different ways and capture it in different ways. To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.”

“The Christians and the Jews do not believe that the Bible is the verbatim words of God. In fact it is clear that the books of the Bible are written by men - allegedly inspired men - but humans nonetheless. God in the Bible is spoken of in third person. This gives the believer a degree of caution. If the writers of the Bible were humans and humans are fallible, the Bible should not be taken literally. It is possible to interpret it, use one's logic to understand it in the light of science and adapt its teachings to meet the needs of the time.”

“Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest numbers of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best. All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.”

“The emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned.”

“Let every creature have your love. Love, with its fruits of meekness, patience, and humility, is all that we can wish for ourselves and our fellow creatures. For this is to live in God, united with him, both for time and eternity. To desire to communicate good to everyone, in the degree that we can and to which each person is capable of receiving from us, is a divine temper, for thus God stands unchangeably disposed towards the whole creation.”

“The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature. . . . [In] the formation of the American governments . . . it will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of heaven. . . . These governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.”

“I am more than a black guy. I am a person, I'm storyteller, I'm a son, I'm a friend, so I am all those things so it is frustrating to a degree to be limited by other people's perceptions of me but at the same time, it is true that I am a black guy and it's like I'm rooted in, but not bound by. That sort of mentality, that's the one that I hold to be true.”

“Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality. One can judge objectively to what extent a person has succeeded in his task, to what degree he has realized his potentialities. If he has failed in his task, one can recognize this failure and judge it for what it is - a moral failure.”

“It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people, their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.”

“Photography has always been capable of manipulation. Even more subtle and more invidious is the fact that any time you put a frame to the world, it's an interpretation. I could get my camera and point it at two people and not point it at the homeless third person to the right of the frame, or not include the murder that's going on to the left of the frame. You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. There's an infinite number of ways you can do this: photographs have always been authored.”