Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams. . . . Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept bright as a sword.
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.
Elvira always lied to herself before she lied to anybody else, since this gave her a conviction of moral honesty.
Deception and “con games” are a way of life in all species and throughout nature. Organisms that do not improve their ability to deceive — and to detect deception — are less apt to survive.
I will never again go to people under false pretenses even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve.
The cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do.
A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.” A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”
I wanted to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why is that so difficult?
A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie.
Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.”
How do you describe the sorting out on arriving at Auschwitz, the separation of children who see a father or mother going away, never to be seen again? How do you express the dumb grief of a little girl and the endless lines of women, children, and rabbis being driven across the Polish or Ukrainian landscapes to their deaths? No, I can’t do it. And . . . I don’t understand how Europe’s most cultured nation could have done that. For these men who killed with submachine guns in the Ukraine were university graduates. Afterwards, they went home and read a poem by Heine. So what happened?
The only journey of knowledge is from the depth of one being to the heart of another.
The road to Jericho today, the road of the Good Samaritan, runs through every underdeveloped country.
Truth will not be ignored. It will rise up and consume us.
Then I will speak upon the ashes.
Before Buddha or Jesus spoke, the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion, the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing.
Truth and Falsehood were bathing. Falsehood came out of the water first and dressed herself in Truth’s clothes. Truth, unwilling to put on the garments of Falsehood, went naked.
