Jane Ryder

“Deep listening, compassionate listening is not listening with the purpose of analyzing or even uncovering what has happened in the past. You listen first of all in order to give the other person relief, a chance to speak out, to feel that someone finally understands him or her. Deep listening is the kind of listening that helps us to keep compassion alive while the other speaks, which may be for half an hour or forty-five minutes. During this time you have in mind only one idea, one desire: to listen in order to give the other person the chance to speak out and suffer less. This is your only purpose. Other things like analyzing, understanding the past, can be a by-product of this work. But first of all listen with compassion. Compassion”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger

“What causes all the hatred? At some level, it’s always the same thing: human beings operating under the influence of human brains whose design presupposed their specialness. That is, human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields that control us in many and subtle ways, convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real us”; whereas they and theirs aren’t in the right and aren’t by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real them.” And it doesn’t help matters that these reality-distortion fields often magnify, even out-and-out fabricate, the threat posed by them and theirs.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“Those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.”
― Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza

“The one thing I hope people take away from my books is that the world is not nearly as bad as it seems on the news. There are so many differences on the surface between people from other nations and cultures. It's good to have those differences — there's a lot of power in having those different cultures — but deep inside I believe people are the same”
― Michael Shusko