Loss of Potential Quotes

I know what falling off the cliff means. I know from being considered a very bright kid to being considered like a moron and dropping out of school.

You have destroyed so many flourishing and hopeful lives. Are you in a position to compensate the family of even a single dead man who would never willingly chosen to sacrifice himself in exchange for all the world’s billions.

"Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly"... "And if left unresolved you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place."

Once genius is submerged by bureaucracy, a nation is doomed to mediocrity..

If I'm using drugs and alcohol, it means that I've given up on my fullest potential.

I remember once imagining what my life would be like, what I'd be like. I pictured having all these qualities, strong positive qualities that people could pick up on from across the room. But as time passed, few became qualities that I actually had. And all the possibilities I faced, and the sorts of people I could be, all of them got reduced every year to fewer and fewer until finally they got reduced to one - to who I am. And that's who I am.

When you start fooling around with drugs, you're hurting your creativity, you're hurting your health. Drugs are death, in one form or another. If they don't kill you, they kill your soul. And if your soul's dead, you've got nothing to offer, anyway.

Wars--and what is war except crime on a mass scale?--destroy rather than produce. The vandal that destroys a window causes not only the owner to bear the costs of replacing it, but costs those whom he planned on using that money to buy from. The same goes for wars. The warlords--of war and peace--destroyed so much, not only what existed, but all those new things that could have existed, if only individuals were left in peace.

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?

It's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction.

One is always enthralled, I think, when a young writer you're just beginning to read and comprehend dies.

Once I was in New York, I completely had no interest for a long time in what happened in China because I had been through so much. Seeing my father's life struggle and so many whole generations lose their potential or possibility in their lives. Just being pushed into this political struggle and the damage done not only to their lives but their relatives.

WE begin to die not in our sense or extremities, but in our divine faculties.

I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted, and completely crippled. In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.

With every step of the recent traveler our inheritance of the wonderful is diminished. Those beautiful pictured notes of the possible are redeemed at a ruinous discount in the hard coin of the actual.