Michael Ventura quotes:

To be physically astute and psychologically tended, yet morally insulated and conceptually blind--is to be crazy, not healthy.

It may be that it is not given to us to know when we are angels. We may only be given to know when others are. This may be one of the reasons we need each other so.

Be careful how you choose your enemy, for you will come to resemble him. The moment you adapt your enemy's methods your enemy has won. The rest is suffering and historical opera.

That's what America's all about, man, if it's about anything. You can choose your own name.

If I had the money and the drinking capacity, I'd probably live at a roulette table and let my life go to hell.

All paths cause pain, so to chose the safe over the audacious will not give you less pain, only less beauty.

Good is not the opposite of evil, joy is the opposite of evil.

Leave people alone when they tell you to leave them alone. If they mean it, they need it.

Most of us aren't very graceful about not having our needs met, when and how we want them met.

My employer uses twenty-six years of my life for every year I get to keep. And what do I get in return for the enormous thing I am giving? What do I get in return for my life?

Our choices are truncated in evil's presence.

Stop tolerating in your leaders what you would not tolerate in your friends.

The people you have to lie to, own you. The things you have to lie about, own you.

The value of having an inner map of the world as it is (not as it's broadcast) is this: it allows you to know that your task is larger than yourself. If you choose, just by virtue of being a decent person, you are entrusted with passing on something of value through a dark, crazy time-preserving your integrity, in your way, by your acts and your very breathing for those who will build again when this chaos exhausts itself.

When the people clamor to be shielded from reality, when they praise their government for keeping things from them, when they choose to conduct their lives within the limits of whatever fantasy the government supplies, then they are no longer consenting to be governed, they are begging to be ruled.