A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

All slaves must understand that freedom is not obtained by proving to the master how good it efficient a slave one can be. The system must be made as uncomfortable for the master as possible.

And I could understand that man who, having entered holy orders, gave up the frock because his cell, instead of overlooking a vast landscape as he expected, looked out on a wall.

A lot of editing goes on, encouraged by all sides.

All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was always controlling who got a chance and who didn’t.

Alongside political freedom comes an escape from the social conditioning that deadens our creativity. Every time we engage our creative faculties, we are going against a logic that places work and the nuclear family at the centre of our existence.‘

Always remember: both ends of life, the beginning and end are exactly similar, symmetrical.

And in those yet more developed there is a kind of unity even between separate things, the kind we see in the stars. Advanced level of development can produce a sympathy even in things that are quite distinct.

As the society becomes more and more fragmented into specialized social groups, it becomes increasingly difficult for the individual to find a common base of sympathetic identification and communication with fellow human beings. The individual’s life becomes segmented into many specialized selves, and the opportunity for conflict between and among the different parts of the self correspondingly increases.

A RACIST WHITE MAN WHO BECOMES A JOURNALIST BECOMES NOTHING MORE THAN A RACIST WHITE JOURNALIST, IN MUCH THE SAME SENSE AS A RACIST WHO BECOMES A COP BECOMES MERELY A RACIST COP.

Being aware enables us to critically examine our actions to see what is needed so that we can give care, be responsible, show respect, and indicate a willingness to learn.

Be it said, moreover, that as soon as I had re-won that affection I became aware of its weight. In my moments of irritation I told myself that the ideal solution would have been the death of the person I was interested in. Her death would, on the one hand, have definitively fixed our relationship and, on the other, removed its compulsion. But one cannot long for the death of everyone or, in the extreme, depopulate the planet in order to enjoy a freedom that cannot be imagined otherwise.

Becoming an adult means learning to acquire a much wider repertoire of behaviour towards other people.

Bad unfulfilling relationships are like junk food.

Between these two freedoms grows the beautiful phenomenon of love.

BEING AWARE ENABLES US TO CRITICALLY EXAMINE OUR ACTIONS TO SEE WHAT IS NEEDED SO THAT WE CAN GIVE CARE, BE RESPONSIBLE, SHOW RESPECT, AND INDICATE A WILLINGNESS TO LEARN.

By making the revolution irresistible, the artist breathes life into movements and provides an added dimension that political discourses can sometimes fail to capture.

But, sooner or later, your mask wears out – it is false, it cannot remain forever – then you have to wear another mask. In one small life, how many masks do you wear? And how many have melted away, changed?

Creating agendas of decarceration and broadly casting the net of alternatives helps us to do the ideological work of pulling apart the conceptual link between crime and punishment.

Desperate men often hear, not the actual words of an orator but their own thoughts.

Despite the important gains of anti racist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and it’s most reliable refuge is the prison system.

Deep calls to deep, she knows who I am all right, she’s not foxed by the trimmings.

Ego is a powerful enemy when it comes to better understanding reality.

Everybody that speaks the truth that’s close to the bone is pretty nearly always talking poetry.

Every morning we wake up and re-create capitalism. If one morning we woke up and all decided to create something else, then there wouldn’t be capitalism anymore. Thee would be something else.

Extolling the transformative power of love in his essay “Love and Need,” Merton writes: Love is, in fact, an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life. . . . Life curves upward to a peak of intensity, a high point of value and meaning, at which all its latent creative possibilities go into action and the person transcends himself or herself in encounter, response, and communion with another. It is for this that we came into the world—this communion and self-transcendence. We do not become fully human until we give ourselves to each other in love.

ESTRANGEMENT FROM THE REALM OF SENSES IS A DIRECT PRODUCT OF OVERINDULGENCE.

Existence fulfills whatever you ask, and whatever you are is just a fulfillment of your past desires. Don’t blame it on anybody else— it is what you have been praying for.

For any time a warrior is decorated or praised by his enemy, he is obviously fighting the wrong enemy.

First I shall decide what I can do, then if I should enjoy doing it. Whether anyone wants the results is a much later consideration.

Forget relationships and learn to relate.

Failing to prioritize stupidity over malice causes things like paranoia. Always assuming malice puts you at the center of everyone else’s world. This is an incredibly self-centered approach to life. In reality, for every act of malice, there is almost certainly far more ignorance, stupidity, and laziness.

Forgetfulness of yourself is the only sin there is, and to remember yourself is the only virtue.

Guilt carries its own sickness, but it also carries its own cure.

Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed.

He who voluntary helps the political propaganda aims of a society calling itself ‘free’ is a chump.

Hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises.

Intimacy, innovative thinking, teamwork, and humor all come to those who free themselves from the need to control the narrative and have the patience and confidence to follow the story wherever it leads.

It didn’t occur to any of them that she was doing the same thing for which a man had been praised.

I want to be somewhere more beautiful, I think, and also, everything is right.

IN REPRESENTATIONS THEY ARE MOST OFTEN GIVEN A CHILDLIKE VISAGE TO REMIND US THAT ENLIGHTENMENT COMES ONLY AS WE RETURN TO A CHILDLIKE STATE AND ARE BORN AGAIN.

If you seek tranquility do less.

It has been part of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask full of wondrous-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights to hide the grim realities of the restoration of class power, locally as as well transnationally, but most particularly in the main financial centres of global capitalism.

In despair a man’s sense of virtue is dulled.

It is simply not in our remit to believe in ourselves on our own.

Instead, a lot of people seem to be looking for trouble, the trouble that reinforces their dismal worldview. Everything that’s not perfect is failed, disappointing, a betrayal. There’s idealism in there, but also unrealistic expectations, ones that cannot meet anything but disappointment. Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.

It is one thing to know something intellectually, and quite another to feel it emotionally.

It have some men in this world, they don’t do nothing at all, and you feel that they would dead from starvation, but day after day you meeting them and they looking hale, they laughing and they talking as if they have a million dollars, and in truth it look as if they would not only live longer than you but they would dead happier.

It is the tolerance, enthusiasm and forgiveness of another person that gradually acclimates us to existence.

If feminism means freedom, it means the right to self-determination and the right to be multi-dimensional, disorganized and even incoherent.

If you can cut free of impressions that cling to the mind, free of the future and the past—can make yourself, as Empedocles says, “a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness,” and concentrate on living what can be lived (which means the present) … then you can spend the time you have left in tranquility. And in kindness. And at peace with the spirit within you.

I shop therefore I am, and possessive individualism together construct a world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.

I couldn’t open my mouth to say shit if my throat were full of it.

It was like everything in the world had turned to lawn and I was just pushing my way through it all.

It is extremely unsettling to think of modern areas as having been originally produced under the racist labor conditions of penal servitude that are often described by historians as even worse than slavery.

Just as a prisoner in solitary confinement inevitably begins to experience brain damage, the worker deprived of any sense of purpose often experiences mental and physical atrophy.

Jackie Robinson took it — and then returned to the locker room to wonder if it really had been worth it.

Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into that sea of despair.

Love is the only thing worth doing. All else is secondary. If it helps love, it is good.

Love is a shadow of alertness, of consciousness. Be more conscious and love will come as you become more conscious.

Love is not the question your awareness is the question. This may just be a situation in which your awareness will grow and you will become more alert about yourself.

Listening is more value than advice.

Love is the undercurrent of your being. It is already flowing but there are many rocks many layers of earth to be removed.

Liberal or neoliberal Utopianism is doomed… to be frustrated by authoritarianism or even outright fascism. The good freedoms are lost the bad ones take over.

Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.

Listening well is a matter of continually asking yourself if people’s messages are valid and what their motivations are for telling you whatever they are telling you.

Life is rectangular crossways affair and the only thing to do is to take it nacheral.

Learn to ask of all actions why are they doing that. Starting with your own.

love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades its meaning. When we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.

Look at the individual parts and move from analysis to indifference.

Learn to ask of all actions why are they doing that. Starting with your own.

Love will give you the first proof that life is not meaningless. The people who say life is meaningless are the people who have not known love. All that they are saying is that their life has missed love.

Misunderstandings, like differences of opinion, are valuable reminders that others are not like us, or even remotely like us.

Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death.

Man loves individuals. Man loves things. Man Loves places. And the vagabond lover of life finds individuals and things to love in many places and not in any one nation. Man loves places and no one place, for the earth, like a beautiful wanton, puts on a new dress to fascinate him whereever he may go. A patriot loves not his nation, but the spiritual meannesses of his life of which he has created a frontier wall to hide the beauty of other horizons.

Never mind death. Nothing ever ends. Truth never ages, wisdom never goes out of date, and love never goes out of style. Faith holds the apple to the tree; faith lets the apple fall. Don’t allow your feet to lead your heart astray.

Nobody wants to be nothing. Nobody wants to be nobody, and in fact everybody is a nobody.

No analysis ever really finishes. That is the patients tragedy. The analyst knows that no analysis can last for ever. That is his.

Nobody is cheating anybody, although everybody is cheated.

Our failures to update from interacting with reality spring primarily from three things: not having the right perspective or vantage point, ego-induced denial, and distance from the consequences of our decisions.

Our willingness to make sacrifices reflects our awareness of interdependency.

One of the values invented by the bourgeoisie in former times and launched throughout the world was man—and we have seen what has become of that. The other was the nation. It is a fact: the nation is a bourgeois phenomenon.

Organizing a life around limited formal purposes and segmentalized preoccupations, the individual loses the general sense of mission, or the feeling of progressive flow in life experience.

People in this world don’t know how other people does affect their lives.

Putting it bluntly we could say that the people pleaser is a liar. It sounds brutal, but the people-pleaser is lying for poignant reasons: not in order to gain advantage, but because they are terrified at the displeasure of others.

Relating means you are always starting, you are continuously trying to become acquainted. Again and again, you are introducing yourself to each other. You are trying to seethe many facets of the others personality.

Real love is always in the present. Egoistic love is always either in the past or in the future.

Recall that the way someone says sure can indicate whether that person is eager, ambivalent, or resistant to help with a request. Font styles notwithstanding, the word sure always looks the same on a screen.

Rather than update our views, we double down our effort, accelerating our frustrations and anxiety.

Silence can be either protest or consent but most times it’s fear.

Suffering has become a badge of economic citizenship. It’s not that much different than a home address. Without it, you have no right to make any other claim.

Some cry: “Love me!” Others: “Don’t love me!” But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: “Don’t love me and be faithful to me!

Self Love cannot flourish in isolation.

Socratic questioning stops you from relying on your gut and limits strong emotional responses.

So keep getting away from it all — like that. Renew yourself. But keep it basic. A quick visit should be enough to ward off all; and send you back ready to face what awaits you.

Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time.

Stories migrate secretly. The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is just a way to save face.

The most powerful outcomes are delayed.

To be a disciple means to learn the discipline of being yourself, of being your true self.

Thousands of fish out there, eating each other. Endless mouths and assholes swallowing and shitting. The whole earth was nothing but mouths and assholes swallowing and shitting, and fucking.

To dwell poetically as humanity is to find in our collective and individual experiences of the world “currents” of the influx of nature that can be brought to full, personal expression in culture, even if the latter remains ultimately natural, that is to say, “given”. The impersonal expressions of the natural world become the site of our personal, human expressions of belonging and welcoming.

The mass media dwells on and perpetuates an ethic of domination and violence because our image makers have more intimate knowledge of these realities than they have with the realities of love.

The fraction of the whole earth you crawl about on. Keep all that in mind, and don’t treat anything as important except doing what your nature demands, and accepting what Nature sends you.

To think that you know your wife is very ungrateful. How can you know the woman? How can you know the man? They are processes not things.

THE RAVAGES OF ADDICTION ARE MORE GLARINGLY OBVIOUS IN THE LIVES OF THE POOR AND DISPOSSESSED BECAUSE THEY HAVE NEITHER THE MEANS TO ENGAGE IN THE COVER-UPS SO EFFECTIVELY EMPLOYED BY PRIVILEGED ADDICTS.

Though you can remember your map only as a blank sheet of paper, which can tell you nothing, you are not really lost.

The fundamental question is how to go beyond the measurable and enter into the immeasurable.

There is a particularly feminine conflict in making the choice to stay or leave, and there is danger inherent in both decisions.

To be free is, to abolish ends. The innocence of the ceaseless change of things, as soon as one consents to it, represents the maximum liberty. The free mind willingly accepts what is necessary.

The hindrances have to be removed, the obstacles have to be destroyed— the love is your natural spontaneous being.

Truth and seeker cannot exist together.

Time will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally, bad habits make time your enemy.

This is earth it will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be destruction.

The prisons presumed goal of rehabilitation has been thoroughly replaced by incapacitation as the major object of imprisonment

The problem was you had to keep choosing beyond evil and another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

Things does have a way of fixing themselves, whether you worry or not. If you hustle, it will happen, if you don’t hustle, it will still happen. Everybody living to dead, no matter what they doing while they living, in the end everybody dead.

The contemporary disestablishment of writing and other prison educational programs is indicative of the official disregard today for rehabilitative strategies, particularly those that encourage individual prisoners to acquire autonomy of the mind.

The other became the mirror. And you have not broken the mirror — you have learned so much about yourself, now there is no need to look in the mirror. You can close your eyes and see your face there.

The poets have described the world; the point however, is to change yourself into the kind of person who can suss out where the most effective point of struggle is and go there, or support those who are at here already, on life’s side. Which is to say, to sing desire into a loving fighting sociality.

The more you possess the more ego is strengthened; without possessions the ego cannot exist.

The reversion of common property rights won through years of hard class struggle (the right to a state pension, to welfare, to national healthcare) into the private domain has been one of the most egregious of all policies of dispossession often procured against the broad political will of the population.

To whom should one talk back in this world if not to what one loves?

The hindrances have to be removed, the obstacles have to be destroyed— the love is your natural spontaneous being.

The curiosity of someone else gives us the confidence to remain curious about ourselves.

The knowledge that there is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants or children? Go deeper.

the moment I grasped that there was something to judge in me, I realized that there was in them an irresistible vocation for judgment.

The man who loves himself does not love his reflection, he simply loves himself. No mirror is needed; he knows himself from within… If there were no mirror would you become suspicious of your existence?

Under neoliberalization, the figure of ‘the disposable worker’ emerges as prototypical upon the world stage.

Unless you go beyond the territory of the collective mask you cannot find yourself.

Victory for the slave depends not necessarily upon winning the battle. By the very act of revolting he has cast doubt on the absolute authority of his oppressors.

You’re using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of… of abstractions.

You can be alone in the marketplace. It is simply a question of being aware, alert, watchful, remembering that you are your own watchfulness.

You’re not even living your own lie. Most of the time you’re not even quite living somebody else’s lie either. Your job is more like a boss’s unzippered fly that everyone can see but also knows better than to mention.

When things are unclear, we should look around for analogies from apparently alien but secretly sympathetic domains

We rarely call resistance art.

We are not revolting We know, of course, how much there is that is unappealing and wrong about us. We are the masters of self-hatred; we know all our worst angles, every mistake we’ve ever made, every idiotic thing we’ve ever said.

While it is important to start locally and build movements in our communities, the most radical work is work that looks beyond borders and nations, and finds subversive ways to link the work of oppressed people across the world.

What is poetry outside capitalism? I can’t tell you because I’ve never experienced that. But I do know that more people will be able to be poets. I do know that the form might change and be more accessible to people.

We may describe someone as ‘not sexy’ or ‘boring’ when in truth we mean: unlikely to make me suffer in the way I need to suffer in order to feel that love is real.

When it comes to seeing what is—that is, understanding reality—we can follow Charles Darwin’s advice to notice things “which easily escape attention,” and ask why things happened.

We are educated to associate virtue with submission to authorities rather than with an exploration of the volumes daily transcribed within ourselves by our personal mechanisms.

When you say to a woman or a man, “ I love you”, you are simply saying, “I cannot be deceived by your body I have seen you.. the core that is divine.”

we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own. If a god appeared to us—or a wise human being, even—and prohibited us from concealing our thoughts or imagining anything without immediately shouting it out, we wouldn’t make it through a single day. That’s how much we value other people’s opinions—instead of our own.

When we have been given the chance to be our true selves we do not, at every occasion need to rebel.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

Wait while observing. That is the motto of the educator.

We can all be clever when we tend to what’s passing through consciousness.

We are all so much poorer if all we can do is agree with the books we read

You can’t improve if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.