The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.

James Baldwin

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

Murray Bookchin

To be wealthy and honoured in an unjust society is a disgrace

Confucius

Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be “apolitical” is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.

Rebecca Solnit

If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

Malcolm X

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings

Ursula K. Le Guin

The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth.

Che Guevara

No rights without duties, and equally no duties without rights

L'internationale

"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

Karl Marx

Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all

L’Internationale

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

Emma Goldman

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.

Christopher Hitchens

Nothing prevents the amoral process of natural selection from evolving a brain with genuine big-hearted emotions.

Steven Pinker

Public opinion is often wrong. Mob opinion is almost always wrong. Religious opinion is wrong by definition.

Christopher Hitchens

The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.

Karl Popper

All life is problem solving.

Karl Popper

All evils are caused by lack of knowledge.

David Deutsch

Prediction without explanation is prophecy.

David Deutsch

All things are impermanent. Death comes without warning. This body too will be a corpse.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

The problem is not enjoyment; the problem is attachment.

Tilopa

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle

Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you.

Richard Dawkins

Somewhere, something incredible, is waiting to be known.

Carl Sagan

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Carl Sagan

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Carl Sagan

Those who are governed by reason, desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.

Baruch Spinoza

In fact, every time you breathe out, it is not all that certain that you will breathe in again.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Think carefully about pain and suffering and ask yourself who or what it is that is suffering.

Khenpo Tsültrim

Samsara is like making a mistake, and nirvana is like when you stop making it.

Khenpo Tsültrim

Artists and philosophers agree on one thing: one of their self-appointed tasks is to 'make the familiar strange.'

Daniel Dennett

Meta-advice: don't take any advice too seriously!

Daniel Dennett

Philosophy — in every field of inquiry — is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.

Daniel Dennett

There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.

Bertrand Russell

How do we turn confusion into wisdom? First, we need to understand what confusion is. Confusion is taking what isn't for what is.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

It is said that all sentient beings are buddhas, but they are covered by their temporary obscurations. These 'temporary obscurations' are our own thinking.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

There is no end to worldly pursuits; they only end when you stop.

Jetsun Milarepa

Everything is impermanent, and no fleeting thing is worth pursuing.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

To the eyes of an enlightened person, all people are equal. Every person's blood is red. Every person's tears are salty.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about.

Sam Harris

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious.

Sam Harris

The lies of the powerful lead us to distrust governments and corporations. The lies of the weak make us callous toward the suffering of others.

Sam Harris

Every lie is an assault on the autonomy of those we lie to.

Sam Harris

Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act.

Sam Harris

Unless someone is suicidal or otherwise on the brink, deciding how much he should know about himself seems the quintessence of arrogance.

Sam Harris

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives.

Sam Harris

Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: 'Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature'.

Sam Harris

If you think that Christianity is the most direct and undefiled expression of love and compassion the world has ever seen, you do not know much about the world's other religions.

Sam Harris

A mind that is tied wants to run in ten directions. When let loose, it realises it has nowhere to go.

Traleg Kyabgon

Engagement with politics is like sports fandom in another way: people seek and consume news to enhance the fan experience, not to make their opinions more accurate.

Steven Pinker

It is the very nature of argument to stake a claim to being right.

Steven Pinker

If you take the opportunity to rest awhile along the journey, eventually you'll realize the place you want to reach is the place you already are.

Mingyur Rinpoche

The key — the how of Buddhist practice — lies in learning to simply rest in a bare awareness of thoughts, feelings and perceptions as they occur.

Mingyur Rinpoche

What we think of as our identity - "my mind," "my body", "my self" - is actually an illusion generated by the unceasing flow of thoughts, emotions, sensation and perceptions.

Mingyur Rinpoche

One of the earliest lessons I was taught by my father was that Buddhists don't see the mind as a discrete entity, but rather as a perpetually unfolding experience.

Mingyur Rinpoche

Gradually I began to recognize how feeble and transitory the thoughts and emotions that had troubled me for years actually were, and how fixating on small problems had turned them into big ones.

Mingyur Rinpoche

The unshakable basis of serenity, confidence and happiness was closer to me than my own eyes.

Mingyur Rinpoche

Buddhism is not so much concerned with getting well as with recognizing that you are, right here, right now, as whole, as good, as essentially well as you could ever hope to be.

Mingyur Rinpoche

In many surveys it turns out that every student, questioned privately, thinks that binge drinking is a terrible idea, but each is convinced that his peers think it's cool.

Steven Pinker

Humans can thrive on a modern vegetarian diet and animals' interests in a life free of pain and premature death surely outweigh the marginal increase in pleasure we get from eating their flesh.

Steven Pinker

Pain and humiliation distract children from pondering what they did wrong.

Steven Pinker

In 1987 only half of Americans thought it was always wrong for a man to strike his wife with a belt or stick.

Steven Pinker

The evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked whether he would lay down his life for his brother, replied, 'No, but for two brothers or eight cousins.'

Steven Pinker