It's not the darkness that people fear; it's what they imagine into the darkness.

I've heard people say that they cling to their painful thoughts because they're afraid that without them they wouldn't be activists for peace. "If I feel peaceful," they say, "why would I bother taking action at all?"

It's difficult to seek other people's love. It's deadly. In seeking it you lose what is genuine. This is the prison we create for ourselves as we seek what we already have.

You would be amazed at who people are once you know yourself.

I would go out into the desert. The desert was my teacher. I didn't know about gurus and wise people-I wasn't a reader.

Realizing that people should lie when they do makes me a little more open-minded, a little more tolerant, when my child or my partner lies.

If you are an enemy to your own mind, other people have to become enemies too, sooner or later. Until you understand, until you can love the thoughts that appear in your mind, then you can love the rest of us. You work with the projector -the mind - not the projected world. I can't really love you until I question the mind that thinks it sees you outside itself . . .

No one has ever been able to control his thinking, although people may tell the story of how they have. I don't let go of my thoughts-I meet them with understanding. Then they let go of me.

When you do The Work, you see who you are by seeing who you think other people are. Eventually you come to see that everything outside you is a reflection of your own thinking. You are the storyteller, the projector of all stories, and the world is the projected image of your thoughts.

People don't need sudden revelations. They get what they need when they need it, thought by thought by thought. It's a constant thing when the mind starts to wake up to itself.

We don't attach to people or to things; we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to tbe true in the moment.

Notions of Good and Evil depend entirely on social context. It is not that people are good or bad, they are raised in an aberrant or twisted environment.

People say that the monetary system produces incentive. This may be true in limited areas, but it also produces greed, embezzlement, corruption, pollution, jealousy, anger, crime, war, poverty, tremendous scarcity, and unnecessary human suffering. You have to look at the entire picture.

It is not that people are evil or greedy. The conditions that socially support the system force us to behave in socially offensive ways.

You cannot approach people who think differently with reason and logic if they don't know what that means. First, you have to appeal to their values to start with. If you attack them, you lose them.

LOVE is to stop making demands on people and give them room to grow.

If technology does not liberate all people for the pursuit of higher aspirations in human achievement, then all its technical potential will be meaningless.

The original intent of laws was to get the masses of people to accept the limitations superimposed upon them as being the result of their own misbehavior.

Social change cannot come above the intellect, it comes about by people suffering. And the more people are related to that, the more they lose respect for an existing government. They will seek another direction. If there are too many people who seek a new direction, then the existing government calls upon the army and police to manage society – that is called fascism.

What will drive people if they don't have money or reward? The reward is the end of war, the end of poverty, most crime, and the end of begging for medical care. Everyone will be cared for and educated. There will be no taxation, and no advantage group. No technical elitism, or any other kind of elitism. If that isn't incentive enough, then I don't know what is.

If nations join together now, before the big collapse and share their resources, they can maintain a level of sustainability. Sustain the people that is, and not banks and businesses.

War is not the only form of violence imposed on people through inadequate social arrangements. There is also hunger, poverty and scarcity. The use of money and the creation of debt fosters economic insecurity, which perpetuates crime, lawlessness and resentment. Paper proclamations and treaties do not alter the facts of scarcity and insecurity, and nationalism tends only to propagate the separation of nations and the world's people.

You know that you can't go out there and change the world tomorrow morning. It just takes time, and the realization of that does not produce frustration. What produces frustration, is when you expect the world to join with your cause it's so reasonable. It is not reasonable to unreasonable people.

Truly free people do not need to be told they are free.