To hurt is as human as to breathe.
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles. -- Muad'Dib
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it. . . We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase that reluctance.
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.
I feel like what's come out of me is the gift God has given me just to encourage people, to help them know that there's a better life.
Pain is itself a god: the taskmaster of life. Pain cracks the whip, and all that lives will move. To live is to be a slave to pain.
The bear is what we all wrestle with. Everybody has their bear in life. It's about conquering that bear and letting him go.
Many years from now when your children ask what New York City was like just after 911, this will be the book you give them in response. It's an exquisite novel full of heart, soul, passion and intelligence, and it's the one this great New York author was born to write.