"When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends" - Japanese Proverb

"Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter" - Mark Twain

"Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune -- without the words, / And never stops at all."

Emily Dickinson

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Sun Tzu

"I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book." - Groucho Marx

The Dangers of Pain-Drug-Hypnosis

" There is another form of hypnotism which falls between the surgical operation and straight hypnotism without physical pain. This form of hypnotism has been a carefully guarded secret of certain military and intelligence organizations. It is a vicious war weapon and may be of considerable more use in conquering a society than the atom bomb. This is no exaggeration. The extensiveness of the use of this form of hypnotism in espionage work is so wide today that it is long past the time when people should have become alarmed about it....
" Pain-drug-hypnosis is simply an extension of narcosynthesis, the drug hypnosis used in America only during and since World War II.
" Hypnotism has the virtue, at first at least, of requiring the consent of the hypnotic subject before the hypnotism is done. Further, hypnotism has an additional virtue over drug hypnosis and over pain-drug-hypnosis in that an individual in a hypnotic trance will rarely perform an immoral act, even though commanded to do so by the hypnotist, unless that individual would normally perform such acts.
" Drug hypnotism does not have to be done with the individual's consent. An individual who is drugged can receive and will obey hypnotic commands given to him by the doctor or operator and will continue to obey these commands after waking from the drugged sleep. By using the method of dropping a heavy sedative such as chloral hydrate into an individual's drink, by suddenly muzzling him with a silk scarf from behind and injecting morphine into his arm, or by discovering the individual when he is drunk or shortly after he has been operated upon or during an operation or during the administration of electric shock or sedation in an insane asylum, drug hypnosis can be induced. Thereafter, the operator works much as in ordinary hypnotism. Drug hypnosis can be administered with such wording that the patient will not only forget what he has been told and yet perform it, but will also forget that he has ever been given drug hypnosis if that command is included. And he may even be given data to account for the time during which he was given narcosynthesis. Drug hypnotism, then, can be done without the consent of the subject and is commonly so done even by doctors in the normal course of practice. There is nothing new or strange about drug hypnosis. It occasionally fails to work as the operator intends and it does not usually strike against the individual's normal moral tone, ... It has been discovered that a drugged individual when beaten and given orders would almost invariably obey these orders, regardless of the degree to which they flouted his moral tone or his position or his best interests in life.
"... An individual might be given pain-drug-hypnosis on Tuesday night and wake up Wednesday morning without any knowledge of the fact that he had been slugged when he stepped out of his car, given an injection, painfully beaten (but not so as to leave any marks) and put quietly into his own bed. This individual does not know that anything unusual has occurred to him nor will he suspect it, even when he is confronted with the fact that his conduct is extremely changed along certain lines from former conduct. ...
" The Foundation undertook some tests with regard to the effectiveness of pain-drug-hypnosis and found it so appallingly destructive to the personality and so unfailing in its action, ..."

- Science of Survival, L. Ron Hubbard, c 1951, 2007 edition, pg. 464-466

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin

"Good writing is like a windowpane." - George Orwell

"Invest in inflation. It's the only thing that's going up." - Will Rogers

"Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot." - Oscar Wilde

"No one should be rich except those who understand it." - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"Honor is better than honors." - Abraham Lincoln

"All successful people have a goal. No one can get anywhere unless he knows where he wants to go and what he wants to be or do." - Norman Vincent Peale

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one...and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

- Charles Darwin, from On the Origin of Species

"Man's greatest motivating force is his desire to please woman!... Men who accumulate large fortunes, and attain to great heights of power and fame, do so, mainly, to satisfy their desire to please women. Take women out of their lives, and great wealth would be useless to most men. It is this inherent desire of man to please woman which gives woman the power to make or break a man." - Think and Grow Rich, 1960 paperback edition, p. 195

"If you think you are beaten, you are,
If you think you dare not, you don't.
If you like to win, but you think you can't,
It is almost certain you won't.

"If you think you'll lose, you're lost,
For out in the world we find,
Success begins with a fellow's will--
It's all in the state of mind.

"If you think you are outclassed, you are,
You've got to think high to rise,
You've got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.

"Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man,
But soon or late the man who wins
Is the man WHO THINKS HE CAN!"

- from Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, A Fawcett Crest paperback, revised edition 1960, pg 56-57.

"Do the thing and you will have the power." - Emerson

"Our life is a reflection of the thoughts we habitually hold."

"As you think so you shall become."

- Earl Nightingale

The Jinx

"There are people, then, who seem to be magnets for destruction. Although rarely touched themselves, things happen all around them. One man in a trucking firm was on the scene of seven fatal accidents. As soon as he was removed from the firm the accidents ceased! And yet he had never been a direct or even indirect cause of those accidents so far as physical fact went. His helper, for instance, was in a truck body while this accident-prone stood on the walk. A man fell from the twenty-eighth floor and killed the helper. At another time a motorist ran thirty feet off a road just to strike this accident-prone's truck and kill himself--with no damage to the accident-prone. Seven incidents like that, one after another and the jinx still follows. According to this, then, there is some basis for the maritime Jonah--and in the Navy there is a man who has survived every major sinking in the past twenty years! And was twice the sole survivor."

- from L. Ron Hubbard's letter dated Sep 14, 1939, while staying at the Hotel Knickerbocker, New York City.

"I walked down the street
Without a cent in my jeans,
And that is the reason
I joined the Marines."

- from Adventure magazine, Oct. 1, 1935 issue, "The Camp-Fire"

"A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties." - Harry Truman

"Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean." - Maya Angelou

"Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing." - Vince Lombardi

"Fate chooses your relations, you choose your friends." - Jacques Delille

"A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats."

"There is nothing like the razor sharp tongue of a good friend to cut through the lies we tell ourselves." - Laura Moncur

"If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back." - Lois McMaster Bujold

"If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere."

Frank A. Clark

"Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility."

Oprah Winfrey

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started."

Mark Twain

"An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought."

Pablo Picasso

"Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life."

Dr. Linus Pauling

"The one thing you can't take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one's freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance."

Viktor Frankl

"In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility."

Eleanor Roosevelt

"In gambling, the many must lose in order that the few may win."

George Bernard Shaw

"Your big opportunity may be right where you are now."

Napoleon Hill

"No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time steady eye."

Winston Churchill

"One's mind, once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions."

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The question isn't at what age I want to retire, it's at what income."

George Foreman

"There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave."

Dale Carnegie

"Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation."

Milton Friedman