One of the speaker's main points was that if we want to live less stressful lives, we must learn to live with a single agenda: God's agenda. He pointed out that we tend to live under two agendas, ours and God's, and that the tension between them sets up stress.

The reason we in the West do not suffer more persecution is because we have accommodated ourselves too much to the world around us.

But the politically-incorrect truth is that racism today is a state of mind, more than a social reality.

Oh yes, it exists, and the news media is always quick to highlight examples of anti-black racial hostility, but it is not the all-powerful, institutional beast so many say it is. But once people believe racism is their main problem, they become subject to that idea, and it prevents them from progressing.

T]oday some people continue to view themselves as victims because of the historical suffering of their group and because it is easy and comforting to do so. And this renders happiness virtually impossible. First…perceiving yourself as a victim makes you unhappy. Second, it makes you permanently angry, which further guarantees unhappiness. Third, it enables you to avoid confronting whatever it is that is really making you unhappy.

Going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the stupid and uneducated aspired to be thought intelligent and cultured people doing their best to feign stupidity.

She said that nothing is done to oneself that one does not accept and that if I love someone it would take it all away. What

People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for your to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boreing way there was.

It is not basically a question of the size in repose, I said. It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.

Don't think about that either. If you don't think about it, it doesn't exist. The hell it doesn't. But that's the system I'm going on, he thought.

But the world they were in was not the world he was in.