It’s just simply the fact that the NSA does not think anybody should be able to communicate anywhere on the Earth without them being able to invade it.
If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.
Just as the power of the sun is the only force in the natural universe that causes a plant to grow against gravity, so the grace of God is the only force in the spiritual universe that causes a person to grow against the gravity of their own ego.
The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically, she is the mind and they are the five senses.
A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.
You spend so much time, so much effort, trying to hold yourself together. And then everything falls apart anyway.
By this act the president alone is empowered to make the law, to fix in his mind what acts, words, what thoughts or looks, shall constitute such a crime.