Mean Quotes - Page 241

There's one word that exists in every language on the face of the Earth and in every society since man began to speak. And the word is truth. And in every language it means exactly the same thing. Truth is . . . what you get other people to believe.

Just because we are wearing lipstick doesn't mean we can't kick your ass!

I've always believed in the concept of retirement. I retired for the first time at age 18 ... from school. To me, retirement means doing what you want to do without worrying about getting paid for it.

Putting our faith in Christ is not about trying harder; it means transferring our trust away from ourselves and resting in him.

Individual psychotherapy - that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship - requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient, modest, and a perceptive listener, rather than a talker and advice-giver.

It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please . . . . Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It [the Constitution] was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect.

To be true is manly, chivalrous, Christian; to be false is mean, cowardly, devilish.

Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.

A genuine revival means a trimming of personal lamps.

Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been fate. People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that's a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events -- the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there -- that must also be a miracle. Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.

So you know what we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us make their way into those positions of power... So what we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state, I mean, what we are, are the propagandized masses inside a fascist dictatorship.

When we learn to deal directly with our complaints and difficulties, romanticized ideas about the spiritual path are no longer meaningful. We see that what is important is to take responsibility for ourselves, and to always be aware of our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

As was predicted at the beginning of the Human Genome Project, getting the sequence will be the easy part as only technical issues are involved. The hard part will be finding out what it means, because this poses intellectual problems of how to understand the participation of the genes in the functions of living cells.

This external worship of images has, however, been described in all our Shastras as the lowest of all the low forms of worship. But that does not mean that it is a wrong thing to do.

Religion, in India, means realisation and nothing short of that.

As soon as a man stands up and says he is right or his church is right, and all others are wrong, he is himself all wrong. He does not know that upon the proof of all the others depends the proof of his own. Love and charity for the whole human race, that is the test of true religiousness. I do not mean the sentimental statement that all men are brothers, but that one must feel the oneness of human life.

Trees and flowers were often more meaningful to me than people. They always helped me, consoled me, giving the soul a chance to believe once more than the world was beautiful and sensible, that the mad absurdities and cruelties of men were against the laws of Nature and the Universal Mind; that sooner or later violence would suffer utter defeat on this Earth. No words collected in books were more effectively convincing to me than foliage, clouds, rippling waters, rain.

This would be a tricky operation, no doubt of that, and a mistake would probably be fatal. So many things he had done over the years would have been fatal, had his luck not been strongly good. He had cheated death dozens of times, but that did not mean he could take it as a given. A man needed only one fatal mistake to end the game.

Stardom equals financial success and financial success equals security. I've spent too much of my life feeling insecure. I still have nightmares about being poor, of everything I own just vanishing away. Stardom means that can't happen.

You're not just trying to do something marginally, incrementally better. You're doing something that is a fundamental paradigm shift, that will have exponential impact. That means it's harder to do, but ultimately, if it's successful, the impact it has is far greater.

Nuclear arms is pretty scary because that could end the world. I'm more interested in that stuff than I am Bill Clinton. I mean, I think Bill Clinton is a good president.

A long, healthy, and happy life is the result of making contributions, of having meaningful projects that are personally exciting and contribute to and bless the lives of others.

I think whether you are a judge on my court or whether you are a judge on a court of appeals or any court, and lawyers too - and if you're interested in law yourself, you'll be in the same situation - you have a text that isn't clear. If the text is clear, you follow the text. If the text isn't clear, you have to work out what it means. And that requires context.

I think it is well . . . for the man in the street to realise there is no power on earth that can protect him from bombing, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.