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Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
 
The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and its only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology.
 
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
 
Quiet people have the loudest minds
 
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
 
A child shows his toy, a man hides his.
 
BUREAUCRACY: A giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
 
I am asking myself what is fear: not what I am afraid of. I lead a certain kind of life; I think in a certain pattern; I have certain beliefs and dogmas and I don't want those patterns of existence to be disturbed because I have my roots in them. I don't want them to be disturbed because the disturbance produces a state of unknowing and I dislike that. If I am torn away from everything I know and believe, I want to be reasonably certain of the state of things to which I am going. So the brain cells have created a pattern and those brain cells refuse to create another pattern which may be uncertain. The movement from certainty to uncertainty is what I call fear.
 
USER: The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot."
 
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
 
Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan, for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.
 
Mindfulness thrives on the belief that the root of problem is to be found in individuals themselves, rather than in a socio-economic reality. Allegedly, it is not society that needs reform, but individuals who need to adapt, change, and improve.
 
There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.
 
But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.
 
First-order cybernetics is the science of observed systems; Second-order cybernetics is the science of observing systems.
 
Our mind is our main limitation.
 
Conventional physics deals only with closed systems, i.e. systems which are considered to be isolated from their environment... However, we find systems which by their very nature and definition are not closed systems. Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components, never being, so long as it is alive, in a state of chemical and thermodynamic equilibrium but maintained in a so-called steady state which is distinct from the latter.
 
The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
 
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
 
I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've propbably misunderstood what I've said.
 
2718 quotes