Quotes by L. Ron Hubbard

“Freedom is for honest people. No man who is not himself honest can be free – he is his own trap.”

“Never regret yesterday. Life is in you today, and you make your tomorrow.”

“A person is either the effect of his environment or is able to have an effect upon his environment.”

“There is only one security, and when youve lost that security, youve lost everything youve got. And that is the security of confidence in yourself; to be, to create, to make any position you want to make for yourself. And when you lose that confidence, youve lost the only security you can have. ... Self-confidence is self-determinism. Ones belief in ones ability to determine his own course. As long as one has that, hes got the universe in his pocket. And when he hasnt got that, not all the pearls in China nor all the grain and corn in Iowa can give him security, because thats the only security there is.”

“The evolution of knowledge is toward simplicity, not complexity.”

“There are no conflicts which cannot be resolved unless the true promoters of them remain hidden.”

“When you can be your own best audience and when your applause is the best applause you know of, you’re in good shape.”

“Happiness and strength endure only in the absence of hate. To hate alone is the road to disaster. To love is the road to strength. To love in spite of all is the secret of greatness. And may very well be the greatest secret in this universe.”

“Probably the most neglected friend you have is you. And yet every man, before he can be a true friend to the world, must first become a friend to himself.”

“To be happy, one only must be able to confront, which is to say, experience, those things that are. Unhappiness is only this: the inability to confront that which is.”

“Experience tells you what to do; confidence allows you to do it.”

“A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.”

“There is only one way, really, to get into a state of living, and thats live! There is no substitute for an all-out, over-the-ramparts, howling charge against life. Thats living. Living does not consist of sitting in a temple in the shadows and getting rheumatism from the cold stones. Living is hot, its fast, its often brutal! It has a terrific gamut of emotional reactions. If you are really willing to live, you first have to be willing to do anything that consists of living. Weird. But its one of those awfully true things that you wonder why one has to say it. And yet it has to be said.”

“The best way to know any future is to cause one. And that’s why, you see, when you start consulting the oracle at Delphi, you’ve taken a step downhill. You have assigned cause for the future elsewhere...So one predicts the future as much as one is cause. The future isn’t a pattern laid out to abuse and bully you. The future is a beautiful playground that nobody happen to be combining. You talk about virgin territory – the most virgin territory there is, is the future. You can do anything you want with it.”

“All disturbance and chaos folds up in the teeth of truth.Don’t ever try to stop truth. It’s the only thing that can go through 16-inch armor plate.”

“How does life become totally painful? By total retreat. Total noninspection becomes total pain.[…]But existence is basically composed of a very few truths onto which have hung a great many artificialities and which man has adorned with enormous numbers of lies. And man is prisoner of his own shadows. Now one of the things you can do with man is to get him to look up and find out that he can look through the shadows and look at the shadows and find out what they are.”

“There are few strong new forces in the world today. Man’s civilization is tired, fed up with war, poverty and crime.Perhaps it is natural that anyone who offered help would also be fought at first. Man is so used to fighting, so used to being fooled.I set out to try to help my fellow man and to do what little I could to make the world a better place.The future will tell more than I could about the value of my work.”

“You may have been taught that the mind (the spirit, the brain) is a very difficult thing to know about. This is the first principle of Scientology: It is possible to know about the mind, the spirit and life.”

“Single men and determined groups have been the only makers of space in which man could walk free.”

“Man thought he had a human spirit. That is totally incorrect. Man is a human spirit which is enwrapped more or less in a mind which is in a body. That is Homo sapiens.”