Tracie > Tracie's Quotes

“Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect.”
― Ivan Illich

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
― Ivan Illich

“Carry a candle in the dark, be a candle in the dark, know that you're a flame in the dark.”
― Ivan Illich

“Some people prefer solitude. They say their peace of mind depends on this.
Others say they would be better off in church.
If you do well, you do well wherever you are. If you fail, you fail wherever you are.
Your surroundings don't matter. God is with you everywhere -- in the market place as well as in seclusion or in the church.
If you look for nothing but God, nothing or no one can disturb you.
God is not distracted by a multitude of things.
Nor can we be.”
― Meister Eckhart

“If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining…

The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.”
― Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class

“Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.”
― Saint Augustine

“Errors do not cease to be errors simply because they’re ratified into law.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“What's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Imagine you come upon a house painted brown. What color would you say the house was?"
"Why brown, of course."
"But what if I came upon it from the other side, and found it to be white?"
"That would be absurd. Who would paint a house two colors?"
He ignored my question. "You say it's brown, and I say it's white. Who's right?"
"We're both right."
"Non," he said. "We're both wrong. The house isn't brown or white. It's both. You and I only see one side. But that doesn't mean the other side doesn't exist. To not see the whole is to not see the truth.”
― Megan Chance, The Spiritualist

“Faith moves mountains, but only knowledge moves them to the right place...”
― Joseph Goebbels

“One always feels the need to wash one’s hands after being forced to deal with the methods of U.S. interventionism. It is so unpleasant and filthy that one shudders. When one hears the pious nonsense of the Jewish-led world plutocracy over the radio or reads it in the press, one need only to look behind the scenes to feel pity for the miseries of mankind. That such a man has the impudence to judge us, to call on God and the world as witnesses of the purity of his deeds, to incite war and send innocent people singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” to battle for his filthy financial interests can only fill anyone with even the most primitive sense of decency with the deepest horror. Were there only such people in the world, one would have to despise humanity.

"Mr. Roosevelt Cross-Examined", 30 November 1941”
― Joseph Goebbels

“The woman is the teacher of the youth, and therefore the builder of the foundation of the future. If the family is the nation’s source of strength, the woman is its core and centre.
The best place for the woman to serve her people is in her marriage, in the family, in motherhood.”
― Joseph Goebbels

“ The dark is generous.
Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from the truths of others.
The dark protects us from what we dare not know.
Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentle dreams in night’s embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what would repel in the day’s harsh light. But the greatest of its comforts is the illusion that dark is temporary: that every night brings a new day. Because it’s the day that is temporary.
Day is the illusion.
Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of its own self.
With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.


The dark is generous, and it is patient.
It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt.
The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout.
The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and it is the clouds above them, and it waits behind the star that gives them light.
The dark’s patience is infinite.
Eventually, even stars burn out.


The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.
It always wins because it is everywhere.
It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.
The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.


The dark is generous and it is patient and it always wins – but in the heart of its strength lies its weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.
Love is more than a candle.
Love can ignite the stars.”
― Matthew Stover

“Gestalt Prayer
I do my thing and you do yours.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
And if by chance we find each other, then it is beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.”
― Frederick Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim

“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us,
it doesn't behoove any of us to speak evil of the rest of us
”
― Edgar Cayce

“A soulmate is an ongoing connection with another individual that the soul picks up again in various times and places over lifetimes. We are attracted to another person at a soul level not because that person is our unique complement, but because by being with that individual, we are somehow provided with an impetus to become whole ourselves.”
― Edgar Cayce

“Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions.”
― Edgar Cayce

“Great numbers of children will be born who understand electronics and atomic power as well as other forms of energy. They will grow into scientists and engineers of a new age which has the power to destroy civilization unless we learn to live by spiritual laws.”
― Edgar Cayce

“If you learn music you'll learn most all there is to know.”
― Edgar Cayce

“Birth in the physical is death in the spiritual. Death in the physical is birth in the spiritual.”
― Edgar Cayce, Reincarnation & Karma

“In every person of whatever station look not for things to criticize, but for something you adore in your Creator.”
― Edgar Cayce

“Individuals do not meet by chance. They are necessary in the experiences of others, though they may not always use their opportunities in a spiritual way or manner.”
― Edgar Cayce

“Mind is indeed the Builder . . . what is held in the act of mental vision becomes a reality in the material experience. We are gradually builded to that image created within our own mental being.”
― Edgar Cayce

“For all prayer is answered. Don't tell God how to answer it. Make thy wants known to Him. Live as if ye expected them to be answered. For He has given, "What ye ask in my name, believing, that will my Father in heaven give to thee.”
― Edgar Cayce

“You get to heaven on the arms of people you have helped.”
― Edgar Cayce

“Keep the body - or keep the mind, and it will keep the body! - in a constructive manner. That is, think the pleasant things, even when the outlook may be the darkest. Do not allow the little things that are hindrances make for irritating, or to hurt the feelings. For naturally the body is sensitive to feelings of others, through the overflow of those activities in the sympathetic system. But know that God is! Know that He protects those who put their trust in Him; that what is necessary will be supplied thee if ye will keep joyous, keep happy, keep in that way of constructive forces throughout!”
― Edgar Cayce

“This is harder than it first appears: Try in thine own experience, each; that ye speak not for one whole day unkindly of any; that ye say not a harsh word to any, about any; and see what [such] a day would bring to you . . .”
― Edgar Cayce

“There will be a shifting of the poles. There will be upheavals in the Arctic and the Antarctic that will make fotr the eruption of volcanos in the Torrid areas... The upper portion of Europe will be changed in the blink of an eye. The earth will be broken up in the western portion of America. The greater portion of Japan must go into the sea.”
― Edgar Cayce

“You are like nobody since I love you.”
― pablo neruda

“To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life.”
― Pablo Neruda