If we know how much passive violence we perpetrate against one another, we will understand why there is so much physical violence plaguing societies and the world.
...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.
There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.
Imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein, who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life. Imagine what the world would be like with him in power. The idea is to try to help change the Middle East. Part of the reason we went into Iraq was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction.
All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are fundamentally better than any other causes in the world, and they refuse to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all it requires precisely the same foul-smelling manure that is necessary to all other human undertakings.