It takes a lot of courage to face up to things you can't do because we feed ourselves so much denial.
You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles. -- Muad'Dib
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.
If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.
Your most important tasks and priorities are those that can have the most serious consequences, positive or negative, on your life or work. Focus on these above all.
I can choose to grateful when I am criticized, even when my heart still responds in bitterness. I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty, even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly.
You've got problems in Central Asia. And you've got problems within our own communities back home. So if we end up saying, look, this has nothing to do with Islam or it's got no connection with that broader question, then we look, frankly, as if we're in denial about the problem. And the interesting thing in the Middle East is that they have absolutely no problem there in identifying that as Islamist extremism and calling it that.