It’s always been the same, same old story. — Cat Stevens

"Sun is the reason And the world it will bloom ‘Cause sun lights the sky And the sun lights the moon"

"Now Ive been crying lately, Thinking about the world as it is. Why must we go on hating? Why cant we live in bliss?"

"This stranger had the key To any door he wished — with his eyes, I say What kind of majiks, of majiks? What kind of man — Can make me turn and see the way I really am?"

"Now Ive been happy lately Thinking about the good things to come And I believe it could be Something good has begun. Oh, Ive been smiling lately Dreaming about the world as one And I believe it could be Someday its going to come."

"I wrote a song called "Father & Son" about the son running off to do his own thing. Now the story is about my son coming back and bringing a guitar into the house. A couple of years ago, one morning after prayers, his guitar was lying around. I picked it up and my fingers knew exactly where to go. Id written some words and when I put them to music, it moved me and I realized I could have another job to do. Things just grew from there."

"The last place I wanted to return to was the music business. But its the people and the cause that matter and right now theres an important need, which is bridge-building. I wanted to support the cause of humanity, because thats what I always sang about. Music can be healing, and with my history and my knowledge of both sides of what looks like a gigantic divide in the world, I feel I can point a way forward to our common humanity again. Its a big step for me but its a natural step. I dont feel at all irked by the responsibility — I feel inspired."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"