"Government oppressed the body of the wage-slave, but Religion oppressed his mind, and poisoned the stream of progress at its source."

Upton Sinclair

"I think this is the first time I am meeting most of you. But to me, whether it is an old friend or new friend, there's not much difference anyway, because I always believe we are the same; we are all human beings. Of course, there may be differences in cultural background or way of life, there may be differences in our faith, or we may be of a different color, but we are human beings, consisting of the human body and the human mind. Our physical structure is the same, and our mind and our emotional nature are also the same.

"If you think, when you are reading something, if you think, 'Bird is there, blue jay is over my roof. Blue jay is singing, but their voice is not so good.

When you think in that way – 'That is noise!' When you are not disturbed by the blue jay, the blue jay will come right into your heart, and you will be a blue jay, and blue jay will be reading something. Bird is here, in my mind already, and I am singing with the bird.

Pee pee pee!"

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

The Duck

"Now we're ready to look at something pretty special. It's a duck, riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf. No it isn't a gull. A gull always has a raucous touch about him. This is some sort of duck, and he cuddles in the swells.

He isn't cold, and he is thinking things over. There is a big heaving in the Atlantic, and he is a part of it.

He looks a bit like a mandarin, or the Lord Buddha meditating under the Bo tree.

But he has hardly enough above the eyes to be a philosopher. He has poise, however, which is what philosophers must have.

The day the sculptor Salvini died, he was given as all mortals are, the time to review every place and moment of his life. The sculptor refused. "My life has been a series of extraordinary adventures. To revisit them would only make me sadder. I'd rather use my remaining time to review my last work, Divine Nemesis, otherwise known as The Triumph of Death." So, it was...