“New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.”

“It was only in South Africa that I got over this shyness, though I never completely overcame it. It was impossible for me to speak impromptu. I hesitated whenever I had to face strange audiences and avoided making a speech whenever I could. Even today I do not think I could or would even be inclined to keep a meeting of friends engaged in idle talk. I must say that, beyond occasionally exposing me to laughter, my constitutional shyness has been no disadvantage whatever. In fact I can see that, on the contrary, it has been all to my advantage. My hesitancy in speech, which was once an annoyance, is now a pleasure. Its greatest benefit has been that it has taught me the economy of words. I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. And I can now give myself the certificate that a thoughtless word hardly ever escapes my tongue or pen. I do not recollect ever having had to regret anything in my speech or writing. I have thus been spared many a mishap and waste of time. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man, and silence is necessary in order to surmount it. A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech; he will measure every word. We find so many people impatient to talk. There is no chairman of a meeting who is not pestered with notes for permission to speak. And whenever the permission is given the speaker generally exceeds the time-limit, asks for more time, and keeps on talking without permission. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth.”

“I'm shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win. (as a young man battling his deceased brother's heroic legacy)” 

“I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.”

“If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be one nation gone under.”

“Нищо няма да допринесе за човешкото здраве и да повиши шансовете за оцеляване живота на земята толкова, колкото еволюцията на вегетарианското хранене.”

“know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder—alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware—is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all

“Be self aware, rather than a repetitious robot”

“I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy.”

“May our prayers today—and every day—be from our hearts and with the focus of our whole being!”

“The best is perhaps what we understand the least.”

“Always choose the future over the past. What do we do now?”

“It is not wrong to want to work and earn a decent living; in fact, God has given work to us. But this legitimate desire can very easily cross the line into greed—especially in our materialistic society.”

“The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.”

“Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.”