Pain cannot be escaped, yet even greater pain lies in the effort to get away from it. You will try to escape from pain or insecurity, so long as the ‘me’ keeps itself separate from experience.

The desire to achieve (which is also the fear of failure) is what makes the mind lose its fluidity through the rigidity induced by inhibition. This then gets translated into faulty execution of all our actions and compounds our inner conflict and neurotic tension.

– Ramesh Balsekar

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.” 

Alexander Fraser Tytler