"The nature of Buddhism, as I understand it, is to believe that we are all pure and radiant at our core. And yet we see around us so much evidence that people are not acting from a place of purity and radiance."

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Western progress (from one damned thing to another) seems to be essentially the MO of nowhere fast. But, on the other hand, the don't-set-foot-outside-your-own-village/cave ideal or injunction that you find in Buddhism and even in the Daoism of which I'm fonder, seems . . . defeatist. And more than that, it is in contradiction to what nature actually does. Somewhere, somehow, I feel as if these two opposing principles have to be reconciled.

— Quentin S. Crisp