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"An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair."
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"We are what we think about and meditate on. Look around people! America is a buffet of violence, a total immersion."
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Personal Development

"Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves - and other animals."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Cultural heritage define the uniqueness of individuals. Appreciate cultural diversity."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The way of the consumerist culture is to spend so much energy chasing happiness that it has none left to be happy."
Author Name
Personal Development

"We are all artificial and have been unnaturally changed by violence and unwholesome conditioning."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Culture and holiness must be made compatible in the environment of the kingdom."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The traditional Indian mind has been for centuries, and still is, first religious, and then everything else."
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Personal Development

"Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music."
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Personal Development

"All cultures have things to learn from all other cultures. Don't get stuck in your culture! Go beyond it! Get out of your aquarium; get out of your farm; get out of your castle; break your bell jar! Give chance to other cultures and to other opinions! This is the best way for you to see the insufficiencies, absurdities and stupidities in your culture!"
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Personal Development

"There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization."
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Personal Development
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"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."
Art

"The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates."
Society

"She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it."
Emotion

"There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone."
Art

"The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all."
Focus

"I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art."
Art

"The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush."
God

"Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient."
Ethics

"The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir."
Life

"A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane."
Writing
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