Mick

“Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“In Buddhist psychology identifying with and clinging to desire are said to result in your “taking birth.” In other words, you have created an illusory self whose happiness and well-being depend on getting what it wants.”
― Phillip Moffitt, Dancing With Life: Buddhist Insights for Finding Meaning and Joy in the Face of Suffering

“The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men. The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit. The desert was the region in which the Chosen People had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone. They could have reached the Promised Land in a few months if they had traveled directly to it. God's plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back on the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone. The desert was created simply to be itself, not to be transformed by men into something else.”
― Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton

“We must do away with any shred of denial, minimization, justification, or rationalization. To recover, we must completely and totally understand and accept the truth that addiction creates suffering.”
― Noah Levine, Refuge Recovery: A Buddhist Path to Recovering from Addiction