The western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.
There's a big shift in our whole way of living, and it started maybe 10 years ago when [smartphones] came into existence. Up until then, we were at the mercy of the press, and so-called experts that would tell us what to think and how to think.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, "Please God, don't let me look poor." In the year 2000, they prayed, "Please God, don't let me look old." Sexiness was equated with youth, and youth ruled. The most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility.
When I was 21 years old, I had a job playing Santa Claus in a shopping centre in Sacramento. I was rail thin, so it's not like I was a traditional Santa Claus even then. I had a square stomach; that was the shape of the sofa cushion that I had stuffed into my pants.
I've made quite a number of movies like Castaway and a few others where I'm the only guy in the movie and the only place to be is right next to the camera in costume ready to go in order to get it. The years, and more specifically probably the four months prior to beginning shooting, is where the big preparation is that the director does because I knew we were going to get on the set. And the good news is, if you're the boss, if it ain't good, you don't use it. You just cut it out.
Surfing is sensual. It's a real-time engagement with the forces of nature, which happen to be echoes of the past (which after all, is all a wave really is). Briefly we defy gravity and ride the energy of storms from elsewhere. We are intensely alone as we do it and yet completely swallowed by something larger that enforces a sense of perspective and connectedness to the natural world. It's an experience we yearn to repeat so we go searching for it again and again and we spend years sitting in the water waiting for these radiating lines to come in across the event horizon.
A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you're not the customer. You're the product.
I've known Harvey for over 40 years and I worked with him on the Burnett show for 11 years. I guess you could say we're about as close as you can get to being a comedy team.
I have been DJing in clubs for years. I always dreamed to be a famous DJ in Holland. And now it's worldwide. You can't imagine. I mean, I still can't believe it myself that everything has gone so well.
I was in uniform for four years, and I know that heroism doesn't occur from taking orders, but rather from people who through their own willpower and strength are willing to sacrifice their lives for an idea.
Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from.
This splendid book discusses how, in the last two hundred fifty years, large numbers of people have achieved levels of well-being that were previously available only to a few individuals, and how this achievement has given rise to equally unprecedented inequalities. Unique in its focus and scope, exceptional knowledge and coherence, and careful argumentation, The Great Escape is highly illuminating and a delight to read.
The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
The biggest roadblock to middle-class economic advancement is that governments confiscate more than a third of all family income. Each year the average American taxpayer works 127 days - from January 1 until May 7 - just to pay taxes.
Problems in human engineering will receive during the coming years the same genius and attention which the nineteenth century gave to the more material forms of engineering. We have laid good foundations for industrial prosperity, now we want to assure the happiness and growth of the workers through vocational education, vocational guidance, and wisely managed employment departments. A great field for industrial experimentation and statemanship is opening up.
The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them.
There was a clown that tried to eat me as a boy, in my nightmares. Years later I found a clown for booking online who resembled him named Patches. Needless to say, Patches is dead now.
Did the mass of men know the actual selfishness and injustice of their rulers, not a government would stand a year. - The world would foment with revolution.
As you get older, you see how rapidly the years and decades fly by, so I would encourage anyone, no matter the age, to seize their life and be fully present.
Today I am sure no one needs to be told that the more birds a yard can support, the fewer insects there will be to trouble the gardener the following year.
I have a big mouth, and over the years, as the eldest of five, I have had a tendency to speak when no one really cared.
But a mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack. And the way to do this is to look at the abysses that confront man as species and individuals and try to unify them. And I think that psilocybin offers a way out because it allows a dialogue with the over-mind. You won't read about it in "Scientific American" or anywhere else. You will carry it out.
Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.
My memory bank has overflowed out of control forever. I'm surprised my smile hasn't killed me yet. I have lived an indescribable joyful, adventurous, musical dream life and it just gets better every year.
If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.