Radical Honesty Quotes

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We have come to a point in time where using common sense, speaking factual truths and asking honest questions have been deemed radical behavior. While in turn, manipulation, thoughtlessness and dishonesty is often rewarded and rules the day.
Gary Hopkins
I would combine radical honesty with an old rule Warren Buffett has, which is praise specifically, criticize generally.
Eric Jorgenson (The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness)
Lessons of the balance. 1. The relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, leads to pain. 2. Recovery begins with abstinence 3. Abstinence rests the brains reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy and simpler pleasures. 4. Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine overloaded world. 5. Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain. 6. Pressing on the pain side, resets our balance to the side of pleasure. 7. Beware of getting addicted to pain. 8. Radical honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy and fosters a plenty mindset. 9. Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe. 10. Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it.
Anna Lembke (Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence)
Most of us would rather kill ourselves than be, particularly if who we think we are keeps dying. Many of us do.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty : How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Politeness and diplomacy are responsible for more suffering and death than all the crimes of passion in history. Fuck politeness. Fuck diplomacy. Tell the truth.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
We all lie like hell. It wears us out. It is the major source of all human stress. Lying kills people.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
For my own good, I want to hang out with people who want to find out what it would be like to live in such a way as to leave no unspoken words, no unfinished business; I want to be with people who are hungry for the truth, who want to spend time learning and sharing what they have learned rather than defending their images or reputations.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
We need radical honesty—learning to speak from our root systems about how we feel and what we want. Speak our needs and listen to others’ needs. To say, “I need to hear that you miss me.” “When you’re high all the time it’s hard for me to feel your presence.” “I lied.” “The way you talked to that man made me feel unseen.” “Your jealousy makes me feel like an object and not a partner.” The result of this kind of speech is that our lives begin to align with our longings, and our lives become a building block for authentic community and ultimately a society that is built around true need and real people, not fake news and bullshit norms.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy Book 1))
She turned to Frizz. "So you understand the problem? You can't let Tally know about Radical Honesty. There's no telling what she'll do if she finds out you could ruin her plans." Frizz's eyebrows rose. "So let me get this straight, Aya-chan. You want me, a person who can't lie, to lie about the fact that I can't lie?" "We need another plan," Hiro said.
Scott Westerfeld
Love is when you let someone be the way she is. When you let up on your judgments of someone, there is a free space in which forgiveness and love occur.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
The kind of lying that is most deadly is withholding, or keeping back information from someone we think would be affected by it.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
When you are lying, when you are keeping a secret, when you are withholding information or feelings in any moment, you are always doing that to protect something meaningless.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
A mind is a terrible thing; waste it.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty : How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
We learn to "act nice" and deny that we are angry, and we make ourselves sick in the process of denial. This is one of the main areas in which something we can't tell the truth about ruins our lives.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Politeness and diplomacy are responsible for more suffering and death than all the crimes of passion in history. Fuck politeness. Fuck diplomacy. Tell the truth.” - Brad Blanton, author of Radical Honesty
Aziz Gazipura (Not Nice: Stop People Pleasing, Staying Silent, & Feeling Guilty... And Start Speaking Up, Saying No, Asking Boldly, And Unapologetically Being Yourself)
Therapy is over when a person stops incessantly demanding that other people be different from what they are, forgives his or her parents and other begrudged former intimates, reclaims the power to make life work, and takes responsibility for doing so.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Manipulation never works to get the result desired, but it always seems like it's just about to work. When you get what you said you wanted by manipulation, it is never enough.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
The stress that kills or cripples most of the population comes from people being too hard on themselves when they don't live up to their own imaginings about how other people think they should behave.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Christian leadership should include integrity, honesty, compassion, diplomacy, perception, common sense, and forgiveness. Serving as a Christian leader involves servant leadership, which is a radical commitment to their follower’s life that requires acting in love no matter what it costs that leader.
Scott S. Haraburda (Christian Controversies: Seeking the Truth)
What is required after a glimpse of awakening is radical honesty, a willingness to look at how we unenlighten ourselves, how we bring ourselves back into the gravitational force of the dream state, how we allow ourselves to be divided.
Adyashanti (The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment)
Many of us won't express anger with a loved one. We believe that if we expressed our resentment, it would destroy our relationship and our beloved would leave us.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Wishing is a way to remove oneself from what is going on now. Hope springs eternal. Fuck hope. Hope is how most of us avoid growing up.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
What is true changes, so we can't tell the truth once and be done with it. It's an ongoing game.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Willingly embracing the emptiness of the tomb is more difficult for those of us in places of privilege. We have so much “stuff,” so many activities and endless sources of distraction and busyness to fill any potential emptiness, that our pretense is better fortified against any attempts to expose it, whether through circumstance or intentionality. This is why, in part, Jesus speaks so strongly against the love of money. He did not demonize money itself, but recognized how easily we become enslaved to a different master, in bondage to mammon, instead of following Christ in loving service of God and others.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci (Vulnerable Faith: Missional Living in the Radical Way of St. Patrick)
It's not normal to be honest. What is normal is to be concerned foremost with having a good cover story. Normal people are concerned with figuring out the right thing to say that puts them in the best light. They want to live up to their own best guess about what the people they are talking to want to hear.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Meaninglessness is of great value. When you finally get that who you actually are is empty and meaningless, it doesn't matter to you whether you are a jerk or not. There is where your power lives.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Your anger is unreasonable and unfair. Let it stay that way. Trying to make it seem reasonable - which usually consists of trying to make the resented person wrong - is the source of all the judgments and explanations that remove you further from the person and further from your experience of the sensations that arose in your body.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
And when it is a gift, when it is honest, she recognizes and appreciates a man who genuinely appreciates her. These men are rare. Women are people too (radical idea, I know). And as people, we all value those who genuinely value us, not expecting something in return.
Mark Manson (Models: Attract Women Through Honesty)
Whatever your main struggle is, it is insignificant in the face of your death; it is petty and unimportant and has no meaning at all. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Instead of amalgamations of parts having contradictory and uncontrollable purposes, suppose we consider ourselves to be already what we long to be: functional, integrated wholes who produce the results we choose, effortlessly, with our entire beings. Suppose we all, already, are that. All the apparent contradictions and dichotomies the fat person struggling to be thin, the sinner trying to be good, the workaholic longing for time with his family are actually smokescreens, false struggles enacted by our own minds to hide from others or ourselves our true intent. Our true intent is to do just what we do.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
When the truth changes from your speaking, you know you've spoken the truth.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
It may feel less secure than if everyone agrees on what is true, but the feeling of security is just that - a feeling, not the real thing. Less secure is often more reliable.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
When incessant grieving occurs, it is usually out of the person's attempt to handle anger by crying and feeling bad and having obsessional thoughts.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Bullshit is a sales pitch for an interpretation of reality that comes with any interpretation of reality. All interpretations of reality are bullshit. Freedom is not being dominated by your own bullshit.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
The problem is that ideas about forgiveness are not forgiveness. They don't even help. What you are left with is the experience of resentment and the concept of forgiveness and a deteriorating relationship.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Integrity, wholeness, at-one-ness, is the opposite of moralism. Having integrity is the opposite of being moral. If one has integrity, one doesn't need morals. People with integrity operate with rules of thumb, not morals.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
According to Hugh Thomas, author of 'A History of the World', the greatest medical advance in history has been garbage collection. The greatest psychological advance in history is just around the corner and will also have to do with cleaning up. Cleaning up lies and "coming out of the closet" is getting more attention these days. Some day we will look back on these years of suffocation in bullsh*t in the same way we look back on all the years people lived in, and died from, their garbage.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty : How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
They concluded that every suicide can be explained as "an attempt to maintain or enhance the self." The mind is maintained at the expense of the life of the being. The mind survives by being right. The mind would rather be right and die than be wrong and live.
Brad Blanton (Practicing Radical Honesty: How to Complete the Past, Live in the Present, and Build a Future with a Little Help from Your Friends)
Well, Captain Smollett? What have you to say?...All ship-shape and seaworthy?' 'Well, sir,' said the captain, 'better speak plain, I believe, even at the risk of offence. I don't like this cruise; I don't like the men; and I don't like my officer. That's short and sweet.
Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island)
In all honesty Phoebe never actually gave much thought to being Kevin's girlfriend. She fell into their relationship the way others fall asleep at the wheel. She hadn't known guys could be that sweet. Or maybe it hadn't occurred to her before that she might be attracted to someone who didn't treat her like a mild irritant. And he told her he loved her. Moreover, there were tines when she thought she loved Kevin, too. Though what she probably loved even more than Kevin was the idea of someone being in love with her. It seemed like a radical notion. It seemed like the "real thing
Lucinda Rosenfeld (What She Saw...)
If we could admit how bad things are, that would be the beginning of something good, of a kind of radical honesty with ourselves. That would inspire a certain compassion for one another because we would understand that we’re all in the same boat, all shipwrecked. To confess the wounded, fractured condition of our lives—that is who we are! And that would be the beginning of wisdom in deconstruction, of something good. If everyone actually believed that, if everybody acted on that, there would be better political processes and better relationships. If people actually believed that they really don’t know in some deep way what is true, we would have more modest and tolerant and humane institutions.
John D. Caputo (After the Death of God (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture))
The ultimate detachment includes detachment even from the ideal of detachment. This is the kind of thing that can make you lose your mind … and come to your senses. The
Brad Blanton (Practicing Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth: How to Complete the Past, Live in the Present, and Build a Future with a Little Help from Your Friends)
We can simply live life unchained. To be honest is to be free.
Jeremy Gove (Let's Be Honest: Living a Life of Radical, Biblical Integrity)
Taking responsibility means a person no longer blames outside circumstances, or other people, or past events for the conditions of his own life.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Yesterday's truth is today's bullshit. Even yesterday's liberating insight is today's jail of stale explanation.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
You can be really mad at someone and hurt by him or her and stay stuck there. Or you can tell them and express it out loud and what was true a moment ago becomes no longer true.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Telling stories about your memory of what happened may be entertaining for a while, but if that is all you can do it gets boring pretty fast.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Climate is what we expect. Weather is what we get." Robert A. Heinlein
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
The most wonderful thing about this whole process is that people's contributions to the lives of others become the primary means of getting the results they want in their own lives.
Brad Blanton (Practicing Radical Honesty: How to Complete the Past, Live in the Present, and Build a Future with a Little Help from Your Friends)
We would rather be sure of a correctly predicted negative outcome than face the realistic uncertainty of an unpredictable future even if it includes the possibility of great joy and success.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
These fantasies about the future, based on the past, are the hope and hype we con ourselves with. Even if we get what we always wanted it never looks like we thought it would when it arrives.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture. In Yeats' phrase, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of "shoulds" is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-murder and cultural assassination.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty : How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
I glimpse again that biblical rhythm of expansion-and-contraction, assertion-and-subversion. As that rhythm becomes ever clearer as the very heartbeat of the biblical tradition, we will see the basic solution for How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian. Read it all carefully and thoughtfully, recognize radicality’s assertion, expect normalcy’s subversion, and respect the honesty of a story that tells the truth.
John Dominic Crossan (How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation)
One of these games is called, "Okay, okay, I'm guilty." This game is to make it look like you have taken responsibility for yourself when you haven't. Admitting you are guilty is a great way to avoid being responsible.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
about? You have no interest in joining that club!” But that’s how programming works: society’s assumptions sink in, and we don’t even know it until we hear ourselves restating those assumptions—automatically, without thought. We change by becoming aware. We become aware by observing: watching our own conversations, noticing the lies, seeing the truth. And once we get clear about the truth, we can try something radically different: honesty. “Never
Laurie A. Helgoe (Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength)
You can still tell the truth by "pointing to" an abstraction or assessment of your mind, if your intent is simply to point out your thought, rather than to make the other person believe your thought to be the "right interpretation" of reality.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
We are against politeness as a substitute for the truth because that politeness kills. Politeness and diplomacy are responsible for more suffering and death than all the crimes of passion in history. Fuck politeness. Fuck diplomacy. Tell the truth.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
I no longer believe that character formation is mostly an individual task, or is achieved on a person-by-person basis. I no longer believe that character building is like going to the gym: You do your exercises and you build up your honesty, courage, integrity, and grit. I now think good character is a by-product of giving yourself away. You love things that are worthy of love. You surrender to a community or cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you. Character is a good thing to have, and there’s a lot to be learned on the road to character. But there’s a better thing to have—moral joy. And that serenity arrives as you come closer to embodying perfect love. Furthermore, I no longer believe that the cultural and moral structures of our society are fine, and all we have to do is fix ourselves individually. Over the past few years, as a result of personal, national, and global events, I have become radicalized. I now think the rampant individualism of our current culture is a catastrophe. The emphasis on self—individual success, self-fulfillment, individual freedom, self-actualization—is a catastrophe. I now think that living a good life requires a much vaster transformation. It’s not enough to work on your own weaknesses. The whole cultural paradigm has to shift from the mindset of hyper-individualism to the relational mindset of the second mountain.
David Brooks
Most people, however, won't express their resentment in person to the person at whom they are angry. Instead, they gossip, complain, criticize, fantasize about telling the person off, and let it out in other indirect ways. Suppression and displacement to ideals, indignation, and judgments (against others and ourselves) usually work well enough that by the time we males reach 18 years of age and some elder asshole tells us to kill some people to defend some bullshit principle, we run right out and do it.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty : How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Thinking and deciding what to do about the person only serves to suppress the anger. Even though you think the anger is over, it will manifest itself in other ways. Your communication will be less honest and spontaneous; you may be more critical of him; you may find being with him more physically tiring, forget appointments with him, and find yourself inexplicably angry at him more and more. After a while, your friendship may feel more superficial than before and you may not like spending as much time with him as you used to.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
It's probably the meaning of the Resurrection: love dies to be reborn. When we let die our attachments to remembrances, expectations, moral imperatives, evaluations, comparisons, self-images, beliefs about how others should behave, ideals, and even romance, we make ourselves clearings for love's rebirth.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
When you speak descriptively about a present-tense experience, and it changes, you have spoken the truth. It's okay that it is no longer true. Don't worry about it. It is the way things are, and it is fine that they are that way. It's more fun and less boring than trying to keep track of everything. It's called freedom.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Life is about having the courage, or finding it along the way, to become a fuller person so that you can enjoy it more and feel more alive by pursuing interests that might be out of the ordinary. It is about finding joy in connecting with others, even when those connections involve the risk of getting hurt. It is about being fueled by curiosity, not by fear.
Dolores Derrian (Polyamory and BDSM: Discovering Love, Sex, Vulnerability and Radical Honesty)
When we learn to live in the present we are no longer chained to the past. We say to each other: “I am a being who notices. I have a particular psychological history but it doesn't have to dictate the rest of my life. I can choose how I live, rather than just react from my past the rest of my life.” If people don't like that, we saym “Fuck ‘em if they can't take a joke!
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Dean Rusk never beat his wife. He was a decent man. He was a liberal. He was head of the Ford Foundation. And as Secretary of State during the Vietnam war, he killed over a hundred thousand people in a useless, wasteful, unnecessary, stupid war. We would all be better off if he had found a better way to express his anger. His time is passing with the turn of the century.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty : How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit procreation, consumption, and waste, but equally we must radically reduce our expectations that machines will do our work for us or that therapists can make us learned or healthy. The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they could work together and care for each other. Such an inversion of the current world view requires intellectual courage for it exposes us to the unenlightened yet painful criticism of being not only anti-people and against economic progress, but equally against liberal education and scientific and technological advance. We must face the fact that the imbalance between man and the environment is just one of several mutually reinforcing stresses, each distorting the balance of life in a different dimension. In this view, overpopulation is the result of a distortion in the balance of learning, dependence on affluence is the result of a radical monopoly of institutional over personal values, and faulty technology is inexorably consequent upon a transformation of means into ends
Ivan Illich (Tools for Conviviality)
Be Impeccable with Your Word. This is not the same as radical honesty where you just spew everything out of your mouth that is “honest.” It just means if you say you will do something, do it. If you feel like you have to lie to make excuses, then just don’t say anything at all. Don’t Take Anything Personally. This is valuable advice in this era of Internet trolls and “outrage porn.” Don’t Make Assumptions. If someone is upset at you, for instance, who knows what might be going on in their life that you have no idea about? Also, don’t assume you won’t get a raise, or that someone doesn’t like you. Be curious. Ask questions. Be simple about finding out the truth in a situation before you jump to any assumptions. Always Do Your Best. If you know you aren’t cutting corners and always doing your best, then guaranteed you will do exactly the job you need to do.
James Altucher (The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth)
We must return to the first question of philosophy: "Do we want the truth?" We indict others when they ignore it or twist it to their own agendas. But do we honestly want the truth above all else, even when the truth will cost us, even when we must reverse our stance and run the risk of others' derision? Are we willing to radically change our lives in order to pursue it? Are we willing to change, to let go of lifelong, cherished, character-bound beliefs? Are we willing to pay?
Daniel Ionson (And the Truth Shall Make You Flee: Confronting the Truth-Seekers’ Fears and Failures)
I can't help feeling," says Howard, sticking his head forward ruefully, "now I know who you are, that I've been a bit outspoken in some of my remarks about the system." "Not at all!" says Freddie. "Not a bit!" says Caroline. "But I must in all honesty say," says Howard very quickly, jutting his chin out and smilingly blinking his eyes, "that I still think there are a number of things in the universe which really need seriously looking into." "Oh, the whole thing!" says Freddie with feeling. "Ghastly mess," says Caroline. "Absolute disaster area," says Freddie. "Frightful," says Caroline. "So far as one can understand it," says Freddie. "Freddie feels frightfully strongly about it, you see," says Caroline. Howard looks from one to the other in astonishment. "Good heavens!" he says. "I should never have guessed...." "Oh, Freddie's a terrific radical," says Caroline. "Really?" says Howard. "A terrible firebrand, really," says Caroline. Freddie knots himself up. "A bit firebrandish," he admits. "A bit of a Maoist, to tell you the truth," says Caroline. She looks sideways at Howard to see how he is taking this. So does Freddie. "A Maoist?" says Howard, astonished. "Permanent revolution," says Caroline. "That style of thing," agrees Freddie. "What he feels, you see," says Caroline, "is that people ought to struggle pretty well all the time against the limitations of the world and their own nature. Not stop." Howard gazes at Freddie, deeply impressed. "Don't worry," says Freddie. "I don't think my views have much effect.
Michael Frayn (Sweet Dreams)
To be honest means “to tell the truth without expectation,” without aiming for a particular result, without trying to hurt or manipulate the other person in any way. Honesty means telling the truth and being willing to experience everything that follows. It means telling the truth not with the aim of changing or fixing the other person, but simply because the truth is what I long for the most. What I long for the most is to let go of the burden of trying to hold up a false image of myself in your presence. In the end, we don’t need a reason to tell to the truth, to admit what is. Truth is its own reward.
Jeff Foster (The Deepest Acceptance: Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life)
an individual task, or is achieved on a person-by-person basis. I no longer believe that character building is like going to the gym: You do your exercises and you build up your honesty, courage, integrity, and grit. I now think good character is a by-product of giving yourself away. You love things that are worthy of love. You surrender to a community or cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you. Character is a good thing to have, and there’s a lot to be learned on the road to character. But there’s a better thing to have—moral joy. And that serenity arrives as you come closer to embodying perfect love. Furthermore, I no longer believe that the cultural and moral structures of our society are fine, and all we have to do is fix ourselves individually. Over the past few years, as a result of personal, national, and global events, I have become radicalized. I now think the rampant individualism of our current culture is a catastrophe. The emphasis on self—individual success, self-fulfillment, individual freedom, self-actualization—is a catastrophe. I now think that living a good life requires a much vaster transformation. It’s not enough to work on your own weaknesses. The whole cultural paradigm has to shift from the mindset of hyper-individualism to the relational mindset of the second mountain.
David Brooks (The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life)
hope of such a society except that it is susceptible of fundamental reform or radical change? Consider how fruitful it is of meanness, of over-reaching, of envy, jealousy and all uncharitableness.’” Again he paused but Murdoch didn’t risk a comment, just nodded to him to go on. Seymour’s normally calm voice was full of passion. “‘How can it be anything else? A society which in its industrial constitution is at war with honour, honesty and justice, is not likely to beget generosity. It inevitably generates the vices, not the virtues, the baser not the nobler qualities of the soul.
Maureen Jennings (The Complete Murdoch Mysteries Collection: Except the Dying / Under the Dragon's Tail / Poor Tom Is Cold / Let Loose the Dogs / Night's Child / Vices of My Blood / Journeyman to Grief (Detective Murdoch, #1-7))
Doing right is easy when we’re comfortable, but honesty shines brightest in times of conflict.
Jeremy Gove (Let's Be Honest: Living a Life of Radical, Biblical Integrity)
In most true tests of character, we and God are the only witnesses.
Jeremy Gove (Let's Be Honest: Living a Life of Radical, Biblical Integrity)
Credibility and dishonesty are polar opposites, not just in motion, but also in motive. Credibility is driven by a selfless spirit of mutual respect. Dishonesty is driven by a selfish spirit of self-preservation.
Jeremy Gove (Let's Be Honest: Living a Life of Radical, Biblical Integrity)
Our lives must carry the traces of Jesus.
Jeremy Gove (Let's Be Honest: Living a Life of Radical, Biblical Integrity)
in the interest of transparency and radical honesty, each of us would go around the room and say something that wasn't working
Marc Randolph (That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea)
All beliefs are relative. All models are just functional or dysfunctional toward certain ends.
Brad Blanton (Practicing Radical Honesty: How to Complete the Past, Live in the Present, and Build a Future with a Little Help from Your Friends)
The use and abuse of belief is the fundamental issue for the twenty-first century.
Brad Blanton (Practicing Radical Honesty: How to Complete the Past, Live in the Present, and Build a Future with a Little Help from Your Friends)
Most suffering is generated by the tendency of the mind to moralize and judge, and to mistake belief for reality. 4.
Brad Blanton (Practicing Radical Honesty: How to Complete the Past, Live in the Present, and Build a Future with a Little Help from Your Friends)
Without the nonchalance that comes from knowing the difference between our beliefs and sensate reality, we become Shiite Moslems or Baptists or fundamentalists of some kind looking for the chance to kill or die for our beliefs in an attempt to make them real. We become Serbian townspeople who don black masks and force their lifetime-neighbor Albanians out of their homes, stripping them of their legal identities and abandoning them to shelterless, cold, and unsanitary fields, or killing them without remorse. I
Brad Blanton (Practicing Radical Honesty: How to Complete the Past, Live in the Present, and Build a Future with a Little Help from Your Friends)
Truthfulness about beliefs sets you free from unconscious domination by beliefs you have come to think are reality. Then, once you are free of the illusion that beliefs are real, you can choose to be consciously dominated by beliefs you know are not real.
Brad Blanton (Practicing Radical Honesty: How to Complete the Past, Live in the Present, and Build a Future with a Little Help from Your Friends)
Defenders of belief in the institutions of religion, government, and business are the enemies of liveliness.
Brad Blanton (Practicing Radical Honesty: How to Complete the Past, Live in the Present, and Build a Future with a Little Help from Your Friends)
Why “candor”? The key to getting everyone used to being direct when challenging each other (and you!) is emphasizing that it’s necessary to communicate clearly enough so that there’s no room for interpretation, but also humbly. I chose “candor” instead of “honesty” because there’s not much humility in believing that you know the truth. Implicit with candor is that you’re simply offering your view of what’s going on and that you expect people to offer theirs. If it turns out that in fact you’re the one who got it wrong, you want to know.
Kim Malone Scott (Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity)
Catholic education and law schools provide me with a lot of miserable people as psychotherapy clients. I should be grateful. These people are looking for rescue from their education.
Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty : How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth)
The character of the disillusioned warrior soothed by the simplicity and silence of nature is an archetype of this war-driven, industrialized era. It is the story arc that traces the trail of the once-idealistic-now-misanthropic protagonist led astray by progressing culture who ultimately finds themselves and a long-sought truce with their demons in the honesty of the landscape, be it alone or among a native people with a more rightly-aligned set of values. …There is some element of hope for the hopeless found in these stories that speak to the profound depths of our weariness and sparks in even the most disillusioned soul the hope of peace and a quiet life of meaning.
L.M. Browning (To Lose the Madness: Field Notes on Trauma, Loss and Radical Authenticity)
THE THIRTEEN PRINCIPLES Be Where You Are Right Now. Think Before You Act. Make the Right Choice, Not the Easiest One. The Most Important Decisions Are the Small Ones. Never Blindly Follow Your Heart. If you Don’t know How to Work Something, Learn. When Things Go Down the Drain, Don’t Make Them Worse. Take Personal Responsibility. Practice Radical Honesty.
Wes Crenshaw (I Always Want to Be Where I'm Not: Successful Living with ADD and ADHD)
Honesty born of fear does nothing to root out the fundamental cause of evil in the world--the radical self-centeredness of the human heart. If anything, fear-based morality strengthens it, since ultimately elder brothers are being moral only for their own benefit.
Timothy J. Keller (The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith)
There can be a radical honesty to pleasure, a profound nakedness in surrendering fully to the unguarded, unselfconscious states of enjoyment. It's harder to hide or dissimulate when you're enjoying yourself.
Jason Wilson (The Best American Travel Writing 2021)
To deny mess is to deny who we are. To see it, to allow it, to forgive it, is to reach a state of what Buddhist and psychologist Tara Brach calls ‘radical acceptance’, where we can appreciate our so-called flaws or imperfections as a natural part of existence. And then we can exist with openness and honesty, rather than shrink ourselves by trying to shut ourselves away like the contents of a cluttered cupboard. We can, in short, live.
Matt Haig (The Comfort Book)
There are times when our unflinching honesty, vulnerability, and empathy will create a transformative portal, an opening to a completely new way of living.
Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love)
Balance The relentless pursuit of pleasure (and avoidance of pain) leads to pain. Recovery begins with abstinence. Abstinence resets the brain’s reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy in simpler pleasures. Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine-overloaded world. Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain. Pressing on the pain side resets our balance to the side of pleasure. Beware of getting addicted to pain. Radical honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy, and fosters a plenty mindset. Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe. Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it.
Anna Lembke (Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence)
First, radical honesty promotes awareness of our actions. Second, it fosters intimate human connections. Third, it leads to a truthful autobiography, which holds us accountable not just to our present but also to our future selves. Further, telling the truth is contagious, and might even prevent the development of future addiction.
Anna Lembke (Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence)
Every major religion and code of ethics has included honesty as essential to its moral teachings. All my patients who have achieved long-term recovery have relied on truth-telling as critical for sustained mental and physical health. I too have become convinced that radical honesty is not just helpful for limiting compulsive overconsumption but also at the core of a life well lived.
Anna Lembke (Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence)
Overconsumption leads to shame, which demands radical honesty and leads not to shunning, as we saw with destructive shame, but to acceptance and empathy, coupled with a set of required actions to make amends. The result is increased belonging and decreased consumption.
Anna Lembke (Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence)
One of the most radical shifts we can make is from understanding waking up as an event to seeing awakened life as the expression of beneficial qualities - generosity, patience, virtue, honesty, wisdom, lovingkindness, enthusiasm, equanimity - cultivated in our relationships with other. Here, awakening is measured not by the depth of our insight but based on our behavior: how we act and interact with each other and the world.
Pamela Weiss (A Bigger Sky: Awakening a Fierce Feminine Buddhism)
One of the most radical shifts we can make is from understanding waking up as an event to seeing awakened life as the expression of beneficial qualities - generosity, patience, virtue, honesty, wisdom, lovingkindness, enthusiasm, equanimity - cultivated in our relationships with other. Here, awakening is measured not by the depth of our insight but based on our behavior: how we act and interact with each other and the world.
Pamela Weiss (A Bigger Sky: Awakening a Fierce Feminine Buddhism)
In order to make progress, you need to arrive at a place of radical honesty — a place of saying, 'Not only did I create the outcomes that I’ve experienced thus far in my life, on some level, I wanted to create them.
A.C. Winklier (The Conscious Creator's Guidebook: Manifest Your Dream Life And Be Happier For It)
Taken to its highest form, self-love is an energy we use to evolve. Ultimately, I define self-love as “doing what you need to do to know and heal yourself.” True self-love is multifaceted and includes radical honesty, positive habit building, and unconditional self-acceptance. These three pillars work internally and externally to generate and support an enduring sense of self-love.
Yung Pueblo (Lighter: Let Go of the Past, Connect with the Present, and Expand the Future)