Toddlers are so powerful and so egocentric and teenagers are also so powerful, so egocentric.

It is clear that our society can improve only if the next generation is given the chance, through loving and intelligent education, to be better developed than the present one.

Ignorance, according to the Buddha, is our basic difficulty. Psychedelics and the process of aging make that clear to me all the time.

Our emotions are ever-changing and infinitely varied, but the words with which we describe them are fixed and rigid. Our life is like quicksilver, our vocabulary like steel. Sometimes a consummate poet succeeds in rendering the quality of life in words. For the rest of us, this is not possible.

The situation with children is not good in America, nor in other countries. It may be much worse in other countries. It is not just because of the lack of money. It is the lack of the awareness that children are very open, smart and knowing people when they are still very little. Afterwards they close down. Then they become like everyone and we have to work again to open up.

Anybody can make a baby without any checking, without thinking. This type of parenting can be tragic because one of the greatest actions a human being can do is to create another life.

Teenagers have to be sustained; they have to be given something to live for and something that involves them without having to make a child, a human being.