We are the ancestors of those gardening the universe.
There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.
The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.
The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.
Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them.
Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.
Obesity is the result of a loss of self-control. Indeed, loss of self-control might be said to be the defining social (or anti-social) characteristic of our age: public drunkenness, excessive gambling, promiscuity and common-or-garden rudeness are all examples of our collective loss of self-control.
History is the seed bed of the future.
I was taking myself very seriously when I was going through life changes. And I realized that I needed to laugh at myself, particularly at my mistakes.
I don't want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.
The more you give, the better you become.