Quotes from Michael Ventura

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

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

There are writers I know and respect who are very good about what's outside, and not too hot about what's inside.

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

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?

My spirit life is also the medium in which I live. It's not something that comes and goes. Without one the other wouldn't exist.

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

My spirit life very much depends on my work. My work very much depends on my spirit life. And I pray every day, as part of my own ritual, to a god I believe in, not a god somebody else believes in.

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

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.

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

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

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

Our choices are truncated in evil's presence.

It's as absurd to expect a life to have meaning, in contrast to the vastness of the Universe, as it is absurd to take off your shoe and hang it from a tree, but both are wonderful in their way—for I assure you, if you could see that tree, you'd think it wonderful, you'd approve, you'd think that in a wacko way something had been done, something worth doing.

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

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.

He became a surgeon because he was afraid of knives. He got married because he was afraid of women. He had a child because he was afraid of responsibility. Now, his marriage over and his child no longer speaking to him, he turned off all the lights in the house because he was afraid of the dark

Work is a sacrament. Don't despise anyone's.

In joy, our choices may appear to be few, but one's responses are anything but confined, they're inspired, expanded.

the way as the performances enhance and even change the original idea. This is not "improvisation," this is like jazz: composition-in-the-moment.

That's it for today.

There's a strangeness in these hills that tells you not to pray to Jesus, he's not lord of this ground; drive on down to Blythe if that how you pray, Jesus and McDonald's have franchises down there.

I was heading to L.A. Which is my way of saying nowhere.