Brad Blanton Quotes

“Life goes on and the truth changes; this just happens to be the way life is. What was once true is often no longer true just a little while later.”

“Tell the truth. All the time. About everything. What's the alternative to radical honesty? Waste. Wasted time, wasted money, wasted possibilities-a wasted life.”

“The reason for forgiving your enemies is not for their benefit but for your own benefit. Holding grudges against other people doesn’t hurt them; doesn’t even bother them much - in fact, even pleases them if they are still mad at you. It is not in your enlightened self-interest to hold grudges, regardless of whether it bothers the person you hate or not.”

“All beliefs are relative. All models are just functional or dysfunctional toward certain ends.”

“Defenders of belief in the institutions of religion, government, and business are the enemies of liveliness.”

“Most suffering is generated by the tendency of the mind to moralize and judge, and to mistake belief for reality.”

“The ultimate detachment includes detachment even from the ideal of detachment. This is the kind of thing that can make you lose your mind and come to your senses.”

“The use and abuse of belief is the fundamental issue for the twenty-first century.”

“They concluded that every suicide can be explained as 'an attempt to maintain or enhance the self'. The mind is maintained at the expense of the life of the being. The mind survives by being right. The mind would rather be right and die than be wrong and live.”

“Truthfulness about beliefs sets you free from unconscious domination by beliefs you have come to think are reality. Then, once you are free of the illusion that beliefs are real, you can choose to be consciously dominated by beliefs you know are not real.”

“Without the nonchalance that comes from knowing the difference between our beliefs and sensate reality, we become Shiite Moslems or Baptists or fundamentalists of some kind looking for the chance to kill or die for our beliefs in an attempt to make them real. We become Serbian townspeople who don black masks and force their lifetime-neighbor Albanians out of their homes, stripping them of their legal identities and abandoning them to shelterless, cold, and unsanitary fields, or killing them without remorse.”

“A mind is a terrible thing; waste it.”

“Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.”

“Bullsh*t is a sales pitch for an interpretation of reality that comes with any interpretation of reality. All interpretations of reality are bullsh*t. Freedom is not being dominated by your own bullsh*t.”

“Fantasies about the future, based on the past, are the hope and hype we con ourselves with. Even if we get what we always wanted it never looks like we thought it would when it arrives.”

“First, it is of vital importance that you learn to be lost both in experience and in your mind, but not permanently, so that you get the avenue of escape each offers from the other.”

“For my own good, I want to hang out with people who want to find out what it would be like to live in such a way as to leave no unspoken words, no unfinished business; I want to be with people who are hungry for the truth, who want to spend time learning and sharing what they have learned rather than defending their images or reputations.”

“I am an anti-moralism moralist and I write righteously indignant diatribes against righteous indignation. I contradict myself. I have great ideas and a lot to say, but I'm not much of a writer. I don't learn to control myself and do what is required.”

“Instead of amalgamations of parts having contradictory and uncontrollable purposes, suppose we consider ourselves to be already what we long to be: functional, integrated wholes who produce the results we choose, effortlessly, with our entire beings. Suppose we all, already, are that. All the apparent contradictions and dichotomies the fat person struggling to be thin, the sinner trying to be good, the workaholic longing for time with his family are actually smokescreens, false struggles enacted by our own minds to hide from others or ourselves our true intent. Our true intent is to do just what we do.”

“Integrity, wholeness, at-one-ness, is the opposite of moralism. Having integrity is the opposite of being moral. If one has integrity, one doesn't need morals. People with integrity operate with rules of thumb, not morals.”

“Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of 'shoulds' is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-murder and cultural assassination.”

“It may feel less secure than if everyone agrees on what is true, but the feeling of security is just that - a feeling, not the real thing. Less secure is often more reliable.”

“It's not normal to be honest. What is normal is to be concerned foremost with having a good cover story. Normal people are concerned with figuring out the right thing to say that puts them in the best light. They want to live up to their own best guess about what the people they are talking to want to hear.”

“Love is when you let someone be the way she is. When you let up on your judgments of someone, there is a free space in which forgiveness and love occur.”

“Manipulation never works to get the result desired, but it always seems like it's just about to work. When you get what you said you wanted by manipulation, it is never enough.”

“Many of us won't express anger with a loved one. We believe that if we expressed our resentment, it would destroy our relationship and our beloved would leave us.”

“Meaninglessness is of great value. When you finally get that who you actually are is empty and meaningless, it doesn't matter to you whether you are a jerk or not. There is where your power lives.”

“Most people, however, won't express their resentment in person to the person at whom they are angry. Instead, they gossip, complain, criticize, fantasize about telling the person off, and let it out in other indirect ways. Suppression and displacement to ideals, indignation, and judgments (against others and ourselves) usually work well enough that by the time we males reach 18 years of age and some elder *sshole tells us to kill some people to defend some bullsh*t principle, we run right out and do it.”

“One of these games is called, "Okay, okay, I'm guilty." This game is to make it look like you have taken responsibility for yourself when you haven't. Admitting you are guilty is a great way to avoid being responsible.”

“Politeness and diplomacy are responsible for more suffering and death than all the crimes of passion in history. F*ck politeness. F*ck diplomacy. Tell the truth.”