The More Important Blessing (quotes)

“The More Important Blessing is the time and respect you invest in being beautiful and loving to those you share your space intimately with; To live in a Beautiful Way is to make the time for loving them, often” -Ronald Thomas West

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” – Seneca the Younger

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn” -Alvin Toffler

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it” -Albert Einstein

“You can’t convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana with the promise it will get 20 more bananas in chimpanzee heaven. It won’t do it. But humans will” -Yuval Noah Harari

“When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised God doesn’t work that way, so I stole one and prayed for forgiveness” -Banksy

“All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final” -Hypatia of Alexandria

“Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child’s mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them” -Hypatia of Alexandria

“Experience witnesses that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and virtue of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution”  -James Madison

“The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite” -Thomas Jefferson

“The ones who complain and talk the most about giving away Medicine Secrets, are always those who know the least” -Frank Fools Crow, Lakota

”The ’scientific view’ is inadequate to explain … how man is to find and know a road along which he wishes and chooses to make this said progress, unless Manitoo by his spirit, guides the mind of man, keeping human beings just and generous and hospitable”  -Rising Sun, Chippewa

“The knowledge and use of any or all the powers of the objects on Earth around us is as liable to lead a man wrong as to lead him right. It is merely power, with no way of knowing how to use it correctly … unless Spirit is with a man’s spirit for the light” -Red Tomahawk, Sioux

“The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment” -Bernard d’Espagnat, Theoretical Physicist

“The women are right in their way of breaking the rules, because men made them without asking women” -Montaigne

“The history of the great events of this world are scarcely more than the history of crime” -Voltaire

“It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime” -Thomas Paine

“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office” -Aesop

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which” -George Orwell

“The people who came to New England, came for freedom of religion. The problem is, freedom of religion to them meant freedom for only their religion” –Eleanor Roosevelt

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable” – H.L. Mencke

“Is it not absurd when a human being tries to find happiness somewhere outside himself, and thinks that wealth and birth and the influence of friends is of the utmost importance?” -Emperor Julian (the apostate)

“As long as one person acts with noble spirit, even if they act alone, we are all blessed. Be thou that one” Emperor Julian (the apostate)

“In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves” -Buddha

“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood” -Berkely Breathed

“To be beautiful is to be grateful” (for this life) -Ancient Native American philosophy of many tribes

“It is a lot of hard work to be complicated and unhappy. I’m opposed to hard work” -Ronald Thomas West

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