Walter Russell Quotes

Mediocrity is self-inflicted and genius is self-bestowed.

...That inner ecstasy of the mind is the secret fountain of perpetual youth and strength in any man. He who finds it finds onmipotence and onmiscience.

The keystone of the entire structure of the spiritual and physical universe is Rhythmic Balanced Interchange between all opposites.

...The world needed to suffer in order to understand the simplest of universal principles, the unity of man with man and with God. The world of men had to reap the harvest of its seeds of hate, selfishness and greed it had been sowing for centuries. It had to reap this harvest in order to learn that universal law is inevitable and inescapable.

Mediocrity is self-inflicted; genius is self-bestowed.

Defeat I shall not know. It shall not touch me. I will meet it with true thinking. Resisting it will be my strengthening. But if, perchance, the day shall give to me the bitter cup, it shall sweeten in the drinking.

The layman thinks objectively of an apple as a solid object, but the scientist should think of the apple as one fleeting part of a whole cycle.

Man must have new concepts, new ideals and new values which will uplift him from the barbarian desires to kill for greed - to build empires for power - to seek happiness through material possessions or to accumulate gold under the delusion that he is creating wealth.

One reason alone is enough for today, and that reason lies in the national misconception of what constitutes education. All of your lives you have been trained to believe that your mental equipment consisted of learning how to memorize a multitude of facts. This is what I call parroting a man. To my mind, this inadequate concept of education is the crime of the age.

The two directions of thinking are the outward direction toward your material equipment which gives you your resources, and the inward direction toward your mental equipment, which gives you your resourcefulness.

Ignorance and terror are still breeding the fears which underlie our whole world-civilization. World leaders of great vision in science and government are now the world's great need.

Opening and closing spirals constitute the heartbeat of the universe.

The time has come in the history of man’s journey from his material jungle to his spiritual mountain top when it is imperative that he must live more and more in the cosmic Light universe of knowing, and less in the electric wave universe of sensing. Man must know that his power lies in the stillness of his centering Self and not in the motion by means of which he manifests that stillness. He must know that his Self is God in him. Also he must know gradually the dawning awareness of the cosmic Light of God in him, for with it comes an awareness of his purposefulness in manifesting the Light and the power to manifest it.

Seek to be alone much to commune with Nature and be thus inspired by her mighty whisperings within your consciousness. Nature is a most jealous god, for she will not whisper her inspiring revelations to you unless you are absolutely alone with her. (p. 9)

Where Love is there also is unity, harmony and the peace of Love's balanced rhythms in a united world. Where hate is there follows the degeneracy of disunity as night follows the day. That is the lesson which unfolding man has still to learn. Until he learns that simple lesson of power which comes from giving of service to his fellow man instead of taking from him against his will, his civilizations will disappear in their own man-made chaos, one after another, until he learns that lesson.

An inner joyousness, amounting to ecstasy, is the normal condition of the genius mind. Any lack of that joyousness develops body-destroying toxins. That inner ecstasy of the mind is the secret fountain of perpetual youth and strength in any man. He who finds it finds omnipotence and omniscience.

There are six canons of conservative thought: 1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls. 2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism." 3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom. 4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress. 5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power. 6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

Whenever new knowledge of a transforming nature permeates the race, the standard of world culture rises.

The United States is both a conservative power, defending the international status quo against those who would change it through violence, and a revolutionary power seeking to replace

Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O’Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux,

The moment you find yourself working alone with your own ego, stop working, for the emotions of your sensed body are making you aware of it and your work will not be enduring without the Light of your Soul in it. Physical emotions immediately smother spiritual inspirations.

All great masters in any line think positive thoughts, which they put into action with intensive desire tested and tempered by balanced judgement.   All

To him I give all-knowing and all-power to think My universe into rhythmic, balanced forms with Me.

​What he calls his objective human mind is but the seat of electric sensations of his body.

Mediocrity is self-inflicted. Genius is self-bestowed.

I believe that there is but ONE THINKER in the universe; that my thinking is His thinking, and that every man's thinking is an extension, through God, of every other man's thinking. I therefore think that the greater the exaltation and ecstasy of my thinking, the greater the standards of all man's thinking will be. Each man is thus empowered to uplift all men as each drop of water uplifts the entire ocean.

As I have heretofore said, one can know many things which he cannot sense. One can, therefore, KNOW that balance in Nature's polarization principle DEMANDS equality of division in all of her paired effects.   It

We can choose not to think about our power and its meaning for ourselves or for others, but we cannot make that power disappear and we cannot prevent decisions taken in the United States from rippling out beyond our borders and shaping the world that others live in and the choices that they make. Nor can we prevent the way that others see and react to our power from shaping the world we live in and affecting the safety and security of Americans at home.

McGrath briefly notes Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian, and J. J. C. Smart gets a single mention, as does Adolf Grünbaum, but the other major defenders of philosophical atheism of the last half-century do not even merit a nod. His index contains no listings for Antony Flew, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Richard Gale, William L. Rowe, Michael Martin, J. L. Mackie, Daniel Dennett, Evan Fales, Michael Tooley, Quentin Smith, Jordan Howard Sobel, Robin Le Poidevin, Theodore Drange, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Nicholas Everitt, J. L. Schellenberg, or Graham Oppy.

I never let the thought of failure enter my mind. My knowledge of my unity with the Universal One and the fact that I must do this thing, and the inspired belief that I should do it as a demonstration of my belief in man's unlimited power, made me ignore the difficulties that lay in the way. (p. 19)

​Man must know that his power lies in the stillness of his centering Self and not in the motion by means of which he manifests that stillness. He must know that his Self is God in him. Also he must know gradually the dawning awareness of the cosmic Light of God in him, for with it comes an awareness of his purposefulness in manifesting the Light and the power to manifest it.

The disappearance of American optimism would be a bad thing. Much of the dynamism of American life springs from the habits of risk taking, innovation, and entrepreneurialism that an optimistic mindset creates. A more pessimistic America might be a wiser country that made fewer foreign policy blunders, but it would be weaker, poorer, and less influential than the America we know.

Much of the geographical work of the past hundred years... has either explicitly or implicitly taken its inspiration from biology, and in particular Darwin. Many of the original Darwinians, such as Hooker, Wallace, Huxley, Bates, and Darwin himself, were actively concerned with geographical exploration, and it was largely facts of geographical distribution in a spatial setting which provided Darwin with the germ of his theory.

Many have asked if I could more specifically direct them how to kindle that spark of inner fire which illumines the way to one's self. That I cannot do. I can merely point the way and tell you of its existence. You must then find it for yourself. The only way you can find it is through being alone with your thoughts at sufficiently long intervals to give that inner voice within you a chance to cry out in distinguishable language to you, 'Here I am within you.' That is the silent voice, the voice of nature, which speaks to everyone who will listen. "Lock yourself up in your room or go out in the woods where you can be alone. When you are alone the universe talks to you in flashes of inspiration. You will find that you will suddenly know things which you never knew before. All knowledge exists in the God-Mind and is extended into this electrical universe of creative expression through desire. Knowledge is yours for the asking. You have but to plug into it. You do not have to learn anything; in fact, all you have to do is recollect it, or recognize it, for you already have it as your inheritance.

Any diplomat must be able to engage people across all kinds of political and moral divide; any historian, any student of foreign policy, must come to understand a wide variety of attitudes and opinions that, often for extremely good reasons, are largely unacceptable in polite American society today. Whether the issue is racism, misogyny, jihadi ideology, Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, communism, fascism, or, yes, antisemitism, the student of foreign policy must develop the capacity to engage calmly, dispassionately, and sometimes even cooperatively with people committed to utterly revolting ideas.

Spacewar highlighted three aspects of the hacker culture that became themes of the digital age. First, it was created collaboratively. “We were able to build it together, working as a team, which is how we liked to do things,” Russell said. Second, it was free and open-source software. “People asked for copies of the source code, and of course we gave them out.” Of course—that was in a time and place when software yearned to be free. Third, it was based on the belief that computers should be personal and interactive. “It allowed us to get our hands on a computer and make it respond to us in real time,” said Russell.10

Successful men of all ages have learned to multiply themselves by gathering thought-energy into a high potential and using it in the direction of the purpose intended. Let me use as an illustration the gathering together of the powder behind the bullet. The charge behind the bullet can either be used for the purpose intended or dissipated uselessly. The wise hunter sees to it that each element which contributes to the success of his hunt is right. He has given concentrative thought and preparation for days to every detail upon which his success depends. You have to gather your energy together in the same manner, conserving it and insulating it from dissipation in every direction other than that of your purpose.

One of Einstein’s friends at the time was Isaac Don Levine, a Russian-born American journalist who had been sympathetic to the communists but had turned strongly against Stalin and his brutal regime as a columnist for the Hearst newspapers. Along with other defenders of civil liberties, including ACLU founder Roger Baldwin and Bertrand Russell, Einstein supported the publication of Levine’s exposé of Stalinist horrors, Letters from Russian Prisons. He even provided an essay, written in longhand, in which he denounced “the regime of frightfulness in Russia.”72 Einstein also read Levine’s subsequent biography of Stalin, a fiercely critical exposé of the dictator’s brutalities, and called it “profound.” He saw in it a clear lesson about tyrannical regimes on both the left and the right. “Violence breeds violence,” he wrote Levine in a letter of praise. “Liberty is the necessary foundation for the development of all true values.

Marx discovered the significance of economic power; and it is understandable that he exaggerated its status. He and the Marxists see economic power everywhere. Their argument runs: he who has the money has the power; for if necessary, he can buy guns and even gangsters. But this is a roundabout argument. In fact, it contains an admission that the man who has the gun has the power. And if he who has the gun becomes aware of this, then it may not be long until he has both the gun and the money. But under an unrestrained capitalism, Marx’s argument applies, to some extent; for a rule which develops institutions for the control of guns and gangsters but not of the power of money is liable to come under the influence of this power. In such a state, an uncontrolled gangsterism of wealth may rule. But Marx himself, I think, would have been the first to admit that this is not true of all states; that there have been times in history when, for example, all exploitation was looting, directly based upon the power of the mailed fist. And to-day there will be few to support the naïve view that the ‘progress of history’ has once and for all put an end to these more direct ways of exploiting men, and that, once formal freedom has been achieved, it is impossible for us to fall again under the sway of such primitive forms of exploitation. These considerations would be sufficient for refuting the dogmatic doctrine that economic power is more fundamental than physical power, or the power of the state. But there are other considerations as well. As has been rightly emphasized by various writers (among them Bertrand Russell and Walter Lippmann25), it is only the active intervention of the state—the protection of property by laws backed by physical sanctions—which makes of wealth a potential source of power; for without this intervention, a man would soon be without his wealth. Economic power is therefore entirely dependent on political and physical power. Russell gives historical examples which illustrate this dependence, and sometimes even helplessness, of wealth: ‘Economic power within the state,’ he writes26, ‘although ultimately derived from law and public opinion, easily acquires a certain independence. It can influence law by corruption and public opinion by propaganda. It can put politicians under obligations which interfere with their freedom. It can threaten to cause a financial crisis. But there are very definite limits to what it can achieve. Cæsar was helped to power by his creditors, who saw no hope of repayment except through his success; but when he had succeeded he was powerful enough to defy them. Charles V borrowed from the Fuggers the money required to buy the position of Emperor, but when he had become Emperor he snapped his fingers at them and they lost what they had lent.’ The dogma that economic power is at the root of all evil must be discarded. Its place must be taken by an understanding of the dangers of any form of uncontrolled power. Money as such is not particularly dangerous. It becomes dangerous only if it can buy power, either directly, or by enslaving the economically weak who must sell themselves in order to live.

The historian assesses that the investment of the wealthy classes in the Bank of England wedded them to the fate of the nation as a whole and to the maintenance of its stability.

For a good overview, see Walter Russell Mead, “The Return of Geopolitics: The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 3 (May/June 2014), pp. 69–79.

The African villager with a solar powered smartphone has more access to more information than Louis XIV in the halls of Versailles.

Often help from the Lord came in unexpected ways. The time came in Poland to open a mission there, but how do you open a mission without a mission president who can speak Polish? And where does one find such a person? This was on Elder Nelson’s mind when, on October 27, 1989, he attended the inauguration of BYU President Rex E. Lee in Provo, Utah. At a reception celebrating President Lee’s appointment, Elder Nelson just happened to meet Walter Whipple, a professor of Polish in the department of Germanic and Slavic Languages. Dr. Whipple had just returned to BYU after a teaching stint in Poland. Who became the first mission president in Poland? President Walter Whipple, who was also a professional organist and accomplished cellist. “The Lord doth provide,” Elder Nelson summarized. “I’ve seen this over and over again. When we didn’t know what in the world to do next, the Lord stepped in and handed the answer to us on a silver platter. We would have had to be blind not to see it.

by 2016 the wealthy, selfish countries of the European Union were rich enough to take care of themselves. Jeffersonian neo-isolationists wanted the United States to define its interests as narrowly as possible, to withdraw from contested theaters like the Middle East, to scale back and even to eliminate the American commitment to Europe, and to avoid military engagement wherever possible.

It’s been my belief that it is difficult to negotiate with parties that are captive to a conspiratorial anti-Semitic worldview not because they hold offensive views, but because they hold ridiculous views. As Walter Russell Mead and others have explained, anti-Semites have difficulty understanding the world as it actually works, and don’t comprehend cause-and-effect in politics and economics.

back burner, with intervals of détente, reversals of alliance, and many changes in fortune. After the failure of the Armada in 1588, Spain could not attack England at home. English forces were never strong enough to wage sustained warfare on the Spanish mainland. Instead, the intermittent conflict moved indecisively through what we would now call the third world—the scattered colonial dependencies of the two powers and over the trade routes and oceans of the world. English hawks, often Puritans and merchants, wanted an aggressive anti-Spanish policy that would take on the pope while opening markets; moderates (often country squires uninterested in costly foreign ventures) promoted détente.

To sell territory rather than losing it in battle, especially territory in the heartland of the Muslim world that contained one of the three holiest Islamic sites, would strike at the legitimacy of the Ottoman Empire among its Muslim subjects, a group who, after the progressive losses of mostly Christian territories in Europe, were increasingly powerful in what remained of the empire. There was, of course, another problem with Herzl’s proposal.

American culture is fundamentally an optimistic culture. The American experience for more than three centuries was one of material and social progress. An entrepreneurial, forward-looking people set in a rich continent, most Americans have been drawn to optimistic readings of history and of the human potential for improvement. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this cultural optimism was reflected in the development of a benign vision of a peaceful and gradual transformation of human history in a new kind of progressive march to a utopian future. As we’ve seen, many Americans came to believe, either as a religious idea or as a secular vision, that the gradual improvement of economic and social conditions that they saw taking place around them would culminate in a universal reign of peace. Liberal Christians interpreted this through the lens of scripture, arguing that human progress would eventually lead to the peaceful return of Christ and the establishment of a millennial kingdom. For secular thinkers, visions of the utopian future looked to a democratic world in which the nations of the world would renounce war, embrace democracy, and cooperate to establish universal equality and prosperity.

The volcano has not yet gone dormant; the wars of ethnic survival continue to break out. The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, and the Syrian, Kurdish, and Ukrainian conflicts of the following decades demonstrate that the old dynamics are still there.

Perhaps ideological competition is one of the forms of international competition that must be discarded if humanity is to survive. President Richard Nixon’s foreign policy of détente with the Soviet Union and opening to Maoist China was based on the belief that the United States did not have the ability to produce a global liberal order

The lack of political freedom in much of the Middle East combined with the failure of most countries in the region to provide rising living standards and good jobs for young people made radical ideology attractive, and as long as those conditions persisted, terror groups would find support.

With regard to Europe, both the Jeffersonian neo-isolationists and the Jacksonian hawks were angry at what they saw as freeloading behavior by wealthy NATO allies like Germany who refused, as many Americans saw it, to take serious responsibility for their own defense while stiffing America on trade

To the dismay of Fischer, and to the great consternation of prison officials, the governor gave in to McKay. Russell Oswald was particularly worried by what this would mean for his people. He wrote to Attica superintendent Vincent Mancusi, “Frankly I can see nothing but trouble ahead for you, Walter [Dunbar] and me, for the next several months with the manner in which this Commission is moving. You are undoubtedly aware of the fact that they have recruited law students from New York University, Columbia University Law School and Yale Law School to assist in their study. Need more be said?

What Beatrice was to Dante, Guinevere to Lancelot, business has been for millions of English-speakers. They have wooed her as assiduously as Paris wooed Helen.

That raises the most serious threat to the liberal international order—which is not China’s expansionism but America’s abdication. The architect of this system is rapidly losing interest in its own creation. As the scholar Walter Russell Mead has pointed out, Trump’s instincts are Jacksonian, in that he is largely uninterested in the world except insofar as he believes that most countries are always swindling the United States, including and especially its allies. Trump is a nationalist, a protectionist, and a populist, determined to put “America first.” But truthfully, more than anything else, he is an isolationist who has abandoned the field. Trump has withdrawn the United States from more organizations, treaties, and accords than any president in American history. Not only has he slow-rolled a trade deal with the European Union but he has also started a trade war against the bloc and moved to pull troops from European bases—seemingly heralding the end of a seventy-year Atlantic partnership.

Saying that Jesus was a moral teacher is like calling Winston Churchill a landscape painter; both statements are true (and Jesus was a much better moralist than Churchill was a painter) but in neither case does the description capture the true greatness of the person.