Selected Quotes of L. Ron Hubbard

"The only thing which can actually alter self-determinism and reduce it is self-determinism itself. One can determine to be used or worked upon by the environ and its people. But until one makes a determination to do so, one is not so affected."

"There is little joy to be found in gloomy, restrained solemnity. When some of old made it seem that to practice virtue required a grim and dismal sort of life, they tended to infer that all pleasure came from being wicked: nothing could be further from the facts. Joy and pleasure do not come from immorality! Quite the reverse! Joy and pleasure arise only in honest hearts: the immoral lead unbelievably tragic lives filled with suffering and pain. The human virtues have little to do with gloominess. They are the bright face of life itself."

"Man is on the high road at last. Because all of the evils of Man come from Man's effort to deny freedom to Man. His lack of culture is most apparent where slavery has the greatest root.
"And where you have men who are free, they can do a lot of things. Work becomes a pleasure. The handling of effort itself becomes a very desirable activity. And things get built, the world becomes more beautiful. Man is able to engage in life as a game rather than as a slavery.
"And so we get another culture."

"But what do you mean, 'True to yourself'? Actually, you're not being true to yourself, you're being true to your basic purpose. If you're not true to your basic purpose, you've had it."

"But it's simply: Living is having and following a purpose. That's all. That's the formula of life - have and follow a purpose. That's it. If you do it, you're living and if you don't do it, you're not living. And that's all there is to it. I've now given you the basic fundamental of existence and that really is it."

"Livingness is going along a certain course, impelled by a purpose and with some place to arrive. It consists mostly of removing the barriers in the channel, holding the edges firm, ignoring the distractions and reinforcing and reimpelling one's progress along the channel. That's life..."

"Fortunately, Man only changes in the direction of the zenith. He only changes in the direction of the stars. And he never changes in the direction of the snake pits. Maybe he's just cussed enough to know this basically, down deep somewhere. Maybe he's just ornery enough to feel that he's gone far enough south at any time he's gone south at all. And maybe the only direction he's left open is the stars."

"If we were just to engage lightly and mildly on bringing better communication across the world, and particularly communication into areas of turbulence, and not care occasionally when you get a little explosion or kickback but keep talking, it just might be that the entire situation might clarify nicely and neatly. Because you're bringing greater freedom to the world."

"To really know life you've got to be part of life. You must get down and look, you must get into the nooks and crannies of existence. You have to rub elbows with all kinds and types of men before you can finally establish what he is."

"A culture is held together solely and only by education. Whether that education is accomplished by experience or by teaching, a culture as a whole is the summation of its education."

"Freedom of truth is something Man has not been noted for. He's not been noted for this at all. He's been noted quite the contrary for a slavery of something somebody said was true. And that is a vastly different thing than freedom of truths."

"These great spiritual leaders have been hanged, reviled, misinterpreted, badly quoted, have not been at all comprehended, but nevertheless, they are the hands through which a torch has been handed forward through the centuries so that we could culminate with a greater ability for Man and some hope for his future."

"What is a game? A game is an activity engaged upon by one or more individuals in order to maintain his interest in communication in life."

"Trying to find out why you tick, why you're as right as you are, why you function at all, why you think at all, would be quite an adventure."

"Let's say that the soul is life, is the spirit, is the thinkingness, is the awareness or any such term which communicates to you the meaning of life and vitality."

"If you were going to put some life back into society, if you were to put the society back together again so that it did have some wish to survive, if you were going to make life a little bit better, really all you'd have to do would be to put Man a little more in control of his actions and reactions."

"If the world around him is bad, then he is unwilling to grant life. If the world around him he conceives to be good, he is willing to grant life to it. A world with life granted to it runs well. A world with no life granted to it goes into chaos and disappears. Now, this is the riddle of the centuries."

"I admit that some man occasionally will become afraid and will become totally gripped by the belief that there is menace in every fellow man. I admit that a human being can become so aberrated as to constitute a menace to the bulk of the society and that in such a case it is necessary to reacquaint him with society. But I will not admit that there is a naturally bad, evil man on Earth."

"Tyrannies are sown at times when nobody is very watchful, where everybody has a full stomach, where everything is calm, nothing much appears on the surface. And then tyrannies show up and become very obvious when individuals, growing a little hungrier, a little less possessed of production, suddenly notice that there is somebody saying they mustn't talk, somebody saying they mustn't have opinions."

"The reason life is life and people are together and grass grows and trees grow and apparently the rain falls and everything else, is because it helps somebody."

"Where a society is composed of people who are capable of bringing order into their affairs and into the society, into their groups, we of course have a stable society. We don't have a chaos."

"The simplicity of observation, the simplicity of communication itself and only itself, is functional and will take Man from the bottom to the top. And the only thing I am trying to teach you is look."

"There is no short stop on the road to truth. That is the only track that you have to go all the way on. Once you have put your feet upon that road, you have to walk to its end. Otherwise, all manner of difficulties and upsets will beset you."

"We're talking about what life does best: it waves its magic wand and says 'be' or 'live' or 'exist' and things do. And that's what life does."

"You can make any marriage stick or you can recover any facet of any marriage or plaster one back together again any way you want to. It takes a little doing and it takes a little guts.
And that's an understatement if I ever made one."