Please give new life to our Ancient Wisdom by retweeting our old tweets. Click on date for the original tweet.
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Sep 15 2010: People praise freedom in principle but usually choose prison in fact. 2
Sep 15 2010: Religion. Simple answers for those who can't bear to leave childhood behind. 3
Sep 15 2010: You can't "choose life" without also choosing death and suffering. 4
Sep 15 2010: People believe what they have to believe to avoid disrupting their existing emotional investments. 5
Sep 15 2010: There's a difference between freely believing something and believing it because you have set up your life so you now have no choice. 6
Sep 15 2010: Utopias, in the real world, almost always turn into prisons. 7
Sep 15 2010: You can't own real estate. It owns you. 8
Sep 15 2010: However you regard death, your ability to operate machinery will be greatly hindered. 9
Sep 15 2010: Given the choice between freedom and slavery, most will choose slavery, but they call it by other names. 10
Sep 16 2010: Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he'll deplete the local fisheries. 11
Sep 16 2010: There are no unconditional relationships. You have to fight for what you want, even from those you love. 12
Sep 16 2010: This is all you need to know about the meaning of life: No one knows any more than you do! 13
Sep 17 2010: People usually choose their lifestyle based on how it looks in the brochure, not on how they actually experience it. 14
Sep 17 2010: Love alone cannot bear the weight of all we ask it to do. 15
Sep 17 2010: The most dangerous people are those with absolute moral certainty about what should be done. 16
Sep 17 2010: RT @DalaiLama: There must be a way of promoting human values without involving religion, based on common sense, experience and recent sc ... 17
Sep 17 2010: You can't talk people out of their bad habits. You can only defend your own boundaries when their habits intrude into your space. 18
Sep 17 2010: Many will complain. Few will be moved to change their circumstances. 19
Sep 17 2010: To be honest, the life of an exiled spiritual leader is far easier and more rewarding than actually running a country. 20
Sep 18 2010: The hard part about freedom is you have no one to blame but yourself when things go wrong. 21
Sep 18 2010: The main goal of human relations is not to convince people you are right but to get the behavior you want from them. 22
Sep 18 2010: RT @DalaiLama: Unfortunate events, though potentially a source of anger and despair, have equal potential to be a source of spiritual gr ... 23
Sep 18 2010: People believe what they need to believe. My job is to remain vague and not say anything that disrupts their belief. 24
Sep 18 2010: It is not selfish to guard your own resources and abilities because they are your only tools for changing the world. 25
Sep 18 2010: For everything we do, there is a purpose and a ritual. With time, we perform the ritual and forget the purpose. 26
Sep 18 2010: Your weakest negotiating position is when you are handcuffed to the person you are negotiating with. 27
Sep 18 2010: In a world of crushing need and inadequate resources, you must conserve your resources and use them only where they do the greatest good. 28
Sep 19 2010: To journey wisely, you do not need perfect knowledge of every road. You only need to choose your next step. 29
Sep 19 2010: Society is built on a delicate web of withheld information. Speaking the truth in the wrong circumstances can be as destructive as any lie. 30
Sep 19 2010: RT @joesmith_really: The @BadDalaiLama kicks the other lama's ass. 31
Sep 19 2010: RT @DalaiLama: No amount of legislation or coercion can accomplish the well-being of society, as it depends on the inner attitude of its ... 32
Sep 19 2010: The biggest mistakes of nations and individuals are when they see a "trend" in recent events and assume it will always continue. 33
Sep 19 2010: Looking back on our own romantic obsessions, we are bound to exclaim, "I can't believe I fell for that!" 34
Sep 19 2010: Steer clear of people who get mad at inanimate objects, because they will blame you next. 35
Sep 19 2010: Life is like riding a roller coaster backwards. You see the current trend, up or down, but not the curves and reversals of the future. 36
Sep 19 2010: You will never know your true limits until you are pushed against them. 37
Sep 19 2010: The existence or nonexistence of extraterrestrial life is irrelevant to our life on Earth. It doesn't change what we need to do. 38
Sep 19 2010: Technology does not solve the problems of humanity. It merely redistributes them. 39
Sep 19 2010: Thanks to technology, there are far more suffering people in the world than there ever were in the past. 40
Sep 19 2010: All passions are fleeting. We will repeat the same motions but lose the feeling. 41
Sep 19 2010: The greatest tragedy of mankind is that the people who are least capable of raising children are the most likely to have them. 42
Sep 20 2010: That a cause is worthy is not sufficient reason to devote yourself to it. It must also be the best use of your limited resources. 43
Sep 20 2010: Fatalism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. 44
Sep 20 2010: The best treatment for trauma is to thoroughly understand the thing that traumatized you. Only then can you leave it behind. 45
Sep 20 2010: Parenting, like democracy, is a delicate balance between authority and the consent of the governed. 46
Sep 20 2010: One of life's biggest puzzles is figuring out the family we grew up in and what was really going on. 47
Sep 20 2010: Keeping your promises involves two things: doing what you say you will and limiting your promises. 48
Sep 20 2010: My other half often speaks without saying anything. RT @DalaiLama: "Cultivating contentment is crucial to maintaining peaceful coexistence." 49
Sep 20 2010: The message of the Good @DalaiLama: Everyone should be nice to everyone else. The @BadDalaiLama is here to give you more useful advice. 50
Sep 20 2010: Abortion may be murder, but there is also death and greater suffering in bringing more children into the world than the world can care for. 51
Sep 20 2010: Faith is a mechanism people use to justify whatever it is they have already committed to. 52
Sep 20 2010: Wealth is an enabler of dysfunction. It allows people to indulge their delusions and addictions without accepting the consequences. 53
Sep 20 2010: Youth is a blissful state of having a high-limit credit card and no payments due until later. 54
Sep 20 2010: The true cost of something includes not just the purchase price but the ongoing burden of maintenance, which is often far greater. 55
Sep 20 2010: Every man believes himself to be reasonable, fully justified in what he does. Only others are unreasonable. 56
Sep 20 2010: The greatest wasters of human potential are poverty, war, political repression, drugs and spectator sports. 57
Sep 20 2010: If you demand a vow of celibacy from your priests, their sexuality will be forced underground where it is bound to do terrible things. 58
Sep 20 2010: Deception is the way of both man and nature. Detection of it is one of the main challenges of life. 59
Sep 21 2010: Freedom, for most, is the ability to build ones own prison. 60
Sep 21 2010: It is not our role to reform our ancestors. 61
Sep 21 2010: If you support someone unconditionally, they will use you to avoid their own responsibility. 62
Sep 21 2010: Life is a mistake, a catastrophe, a deviation from the plan. All that matters now is what you make of it. 63
Sep 21 2010: Government is inevitable and inevitably inept. 64
Sep 21 2010: RT @nicedream: Teaching tolerance is like teaching a little hate. 65
Sep 21 2010: Educating children against something (drugs, etc.) usually has the opposite effect, teaching them how to rebel against you. 66
Sep 21 2010: Mirrors can lie! They draw your attention to details and imperfections that others honestly don't see. 67
Sep 21 2010: Most so-called luxuries impoverish your life more than they improve it. 68
Sep 21 2010: The half-life of beauty is extremely short. It impresses you on first encounter but fades quickly. Then function becomes more important. 69
Sep 21 2010: Scientists are driven by the blind religious faith that more knowledge is always better, a belief not supported by human history. 70
Sep 21 2010: There is no compelling argument that basic discoveries in science should be made now rather than later. Every "advance" carries a cost. 71
Sep 21 2010: Never mistake success for quality. 72
Sep 22 2010: Bad Dalai Lama has reached 100 followers in 6 days on Earth. Thanks for your support! (For the record, the Good @DalaiLama has 818,186.) 73
Sep 22 2010: "I love you. You love me. We're a happy family." — Barney the Purple Dinosaur (channeling the Good @DalaiLama) 74
Sep 22 2010: There is no absolute truth, only relative truth compared to the other options available. 75
Sep 22 2010: Success can be a barrier to growth, since it tends to freeze you at whatever state you were in when it happened. 76
Sep 22 2010: If your life today is exactly as you predicted it ten years ago, you're probably living in captivity. 77
Sep 22 2010: Dreams come in a million flavors. Then reality dashes them and gives you only one. 78
Sep 22 2010: Neither can the Catholic Church! RT @TelegraphNews: Pope says science cannot explain meaning of life http://tgr.ph/9E1Ry1 79
Sep 22 2010: Between the good and the bad is the interesting. 80
Sep 22 2010: Loneliness may be painful but so is the opposite: losing yourself to the needs of others. Sometimes they feel the same! 81
Sep 22 2010: Every decision is an act of triage. 82
Sep 22 2010: Triage is the rationing and leveraging of inadequate resources to achieve the maximum positive effect. It doesn't just apply to war! 83
Sep 23 2010: It is the nature of society to worship actors—people who only pretend to do things—while people who actually do them are ignored. 84
Sep 23 2010: Bearing children is the ultimate Frankenstein experiment. Let's mix up our genes, throw the dice and see what happens! 85
Sep 23 2010: Whenever quality becomes associated with a certain signal, an interloper will learn to reproduce the signal without delivering the quality. 86
Sep 23 2010: Quality is a lonely business. 87
Sep 23 2010: Just because a little of something makes you happy doesn't mean a lot of the same thing will make you more happy. 88
Sep 23 2010: Charity must never seem like charity. The recipient must pay a price for it, or the gift will be taken for granted. 89
Sep 23 2010: Anyone can appreciate beauty. Only the arrogant think they can own it. 90
Sep 23 2010: To master your future you must make peace with your past. 91
Sep 23 2010: The most insidious prison is comfort, robbing us of the incentive to change. 92
Sep 23 2010: The young man says, "I've got plenty of time. I'll change later." The old man says, "It's too late for me. I can't change now." So when? 93
Sep 23 2010: Many a white knight has rode to the rescue of some fair damsel only to come out soiled and beaten—by the damsel! 94
Sep 24 2010: RT @gauravkantgoel: China's official Twitter account - @BadDalaiLama 95
Sep 24 2010: It's okay to be nice to stupid people, but never grant them any power over you. 96
Sep 24 2010: Men are judged great by history not for their accomplishments but for their ability to produce memorable Twitter-size quotes. 97
Sep 24 2010: Serial killers get the last laugh because even if they kill 20 people they get punished the same as for one. All the rest are free! 98
Sep 24 2010: Education is the most inefficient form of learning. 99
Sep 24 2010: Happiness should not be confused with euphoria. Drugs can give you euphoria, but happiness lasts longer. 100
Sep 24 2010: A relationship isn't necessarily a cure for loneliness. Sometimes it's just another kind—a form of loneliness with much less control. 101
Sep 24 2010: What's really inside the secret Vatican archives? Bullshit! Century after century of utter bullshit. 102
Sep 24 2010: The biggest cosmic joke of all would be that there is a God but He isn't listening. 103
Sep 24 2010: The real measure of wealth is not your income but how much freedom you have left after expenses. 104
Sep 24 2010: The trouble with superheroes in real life is they fly into a problem expecting to save people but end up becoming part of the problem. 105
Sep 24 2010: Fashion is porn for women. 106
Sep 25 2010: The most powerful force in the universe is described in one word: Mother. 107
Sep 25 2010: If you see a defect in yourself or your life, there's no courage in making jokes about it. The courage lies in changing. 108
Sep 25 2010: Intelligence is not a talent but a choice. 109
Sep 25 2010: Hidden within every misfortune is an opportunity. It's up to you to discover it. 110
Sep 25 2010: You can't help anyone until you know your boundaries and how far your help should go. 111
Sep 25 2010: RT @scottishstarr: Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told regardless of wh ... 112
Sep 25 2010: The most romantic gesture is not flowers or a kiss but a word that shows someone understands you. 113
Sep 25 2010: Sleep is your brain's scheduled maintenance period. You can't cheat on maintenance and expect a safe and healthy waking life. 114
Sep 25 2010: You need food, a safe place to sleep, medical care, community with others and a meaningful mission. Every other "need" is negotiable. 115
Sep 25 2010: A romantic relationship should not be confused with a parental one. 116
Sep 25 2010: There is no limit to the cruelty you can inflict on others if you believe you are merely defending yourself. 117
Sep 26 2010: The purpose of paranoia is to defend the ego, to make your own flaws and mistakes seem justified. 118
Sep 26 2010: Paranoia thrives in people with low native self-esteem, especially when they are isolated from others. 119
Sep 26 2010: Paranoia, once it needs to exist, will always find a reason. 120
Sep 26 2010: There is no benign word or act that can't be interpreted as a threat. 121
Sep 26 2010: Paranoia is a defense against loneliness. If the CIA is bugging your phone and aliens are probing your mind, at least somebody cares! 122
Sep 26 2010: Paranoia usually assumes that the world cares more about you than it actually does. 123
Sep 26 2010: Paranoia is essential to sustaining any religion. There has to be a sense that the rest of the world is out to get us. 124
Sep 26 2010: Knowledge should not be confused with wisdom, which is an awareness of where your knowledge ends. 125
Sep 26 2010: Hubris is thinking, when a roll of the dice favors you, that the dice really care. 126
Sep 26 2010: Your relationship is doomed if your partner worships you but doesn't understand you. Sooner or later, worship will turn to paranoia. 127
Sep 26 2010: Paranoia often leads to an explosion of violence as the paranoiac cuts off all avenues for his own escape. 128
Sep 26 2010: The main deception of gambling is that only the winners get noticed. The losers, although more numerous, are quickly forgotten. 129
Sep 26 2010: A person's most obvious self-destructive trait is exactly the thing you can't talk to them about. They will only get angry. 130
Sep 26 2010: Technology is not the savior of man, because every problem it solves inevitably creates another. 131
Sep 26 2010: The key to a great performance, in any field, is seeing yourself as the audience sees you, not as you want to be seen. 132
Sep 26 2010: The real coin of life is not money but time. 133
Sep 26 2010: Atheism itself is a religion, based on assumptions taken on faith. How do you know there's no God? 134
Sep 26 2010: There will always be a difference between theory and reality, and only experience can tell you what it is. 135
Sep 26 2010: Fame, money, beauty, power: all can form a bubble around you that isolates you from accurate information. 136
Sep 27 2010: Curiosity is the privilege only of those who are free to change. 137
Sep 27 2010: Curiosity is detecting what doesn't fit with your current knowledge and exploring it until it is understood. 138
Sep 27 2010: Most adults have little curiosity about the world because it might threaten the value of their own investments. 139
Sep 27 2010: What passes for curiosity in adults is merely "pseudo-curiosity"—exploration only within predetermined bounds. 140
Sep 27 2010: True curiosity is unbounded, with no preconditions about where it may go. 141
Sep 27 2010: People without curiosity are the least adaptable to change and run the highest risk that they'll be blindsided by unexpected events. 142
Sep 27 2010: Curiosity is the hallmark of creative intellect. 143
Sep 27 2010: No amount of love, from the outside, can change something that childhood has formed. 144
Sep 27 2010: If you look around you and see only happiness, you aren't looking very deeply. 145
Sep 27 2010: The Christian God, if He is truly just, will probably cut you a break for not believing in Him as long as you've been good. 146
Sep 27 2010: The paradox of protection is that people get addicted to it and become less motivated to protect themselves. 147
Sep 27 2010: The ugly side of romance is co-dependence, where you enable each others' addictions. 148
Sep 27 2010: The ugly side of romance is co-dependence, where you enable each others' addictions. 149
Sep 27 2010: The ugly side of romance is co-dependence, where you enable each others' addictions and personality flaws. 150
Sep 27 2010: Morality is just another name for long-term planning. 151
Sep 27 2010: The gray area between rules and enforcement is where most of life is lived. 152
Sep 28 2010: The only thing certain about life is uncertainty. Your best laid plans will never turn out quite as expected. 153
Sep 28 2010: Speaking many languages does not imply one is skilled at communication. 154
Sep 28 2010: There is nothing sadder than a lifetime wasted on the maintenance and protection of one possessions. 155
Sep 28 2010: When the emperor has no clothes, you place yourself in great danger by saying so. 156
Sep 28 2010: The more resources you have at your disposal, the more "necessities" you think you need. 157
Sep 29 2010: Biology is not destiny; it just provides a set of strengths and weaknesses. 158
Sep 29 2010: Pain is real, but pleasure is in the eye of the beholder. 159
Sep 29 2010: Only one thing is undeniably pleasurable: relief from pain. 160
Sep 29 2010: Of all the intellectual abilities one can possess, the skill of relevance is most valuable. 161
Sep 29 2010: Youth is a period of joyously going about getting yourself trapped. 162
Sep 29 2010: There are many people in the world who would do us harm, but their threat is minor compared to the harm we do ourselves. 163
Sep 29 2010: Pity the king, alone in his castle, imprisoned by the same stone walls that protect him. 164
Sep 30 2010: The purpose of the mind is to produce possible outputs from impossible inputs. 165
Sep 30 2010: Life is the process of solving the problems presented to you. 166
Sep 30 2010: Education can teach the outward form and procedures of things but not their inner purpose and meaning. 167
Sep 30 2010: Students graduate from college smarter and wiser than when they went in. The reason is simple: age. 168
Sep 30 2010: The joyous part of romance is the Exploration Phase. It is followed by the longer Obligation Phase when you try to pay the bills. 169
Sep 30 2010: The more words someone produces with their mouth, the less action you can expect from their body. 170
Sep 30 2010: Experience is the best teacher. When it slaps you hard across the face, you never forget the lesson! 171
Sep 30 2010: Freedom is the ability to change course in response to unexpected circumstances. 172
Sep 30 2010: The nature of freedom is that you don't know in advance what you might need it for. 173
Sep 30 2010: When people say on their wedding day, "I'll never be lonely again," they don't understand: You can be married and still be lonely. 174
Sep 30 2010: The highest standard of morality is to be consistent with yourself. 175
Sep 30 2010: There is no honor in selling people bad choices. 176
Sep 30 2010: If porn is just the same acts repeated over and over, why do we need new porn? Can't we just recycle the old porn and save the environment? 177
Sep 30 2010: One person's erotica is another's tedium. 178
Sep 30 2010: Most people can't handle freedom. Without the enforced structure of debts, obligations and a job, they would self-destruct. 179
Sep 30 2010: Identity etched on the skin is a weak substitute for identity defined by behavior.
[End of archive. 179 tweets displayed of 15877 archived as of , .]
Please give new life to our Ancient Wisdom by retweeting our old tweets. Click on date for the original tweet.