Werner Erhard (book)

“It was an introductory gimmick. I wanted to give customers a name that was easy to remember.”

“He could sell you City Hall.”

“Not only would he sell you City Hall. You would think you got it all tied up in a ribbon. Werner sold something to you graciously.”

“What happened had no form. It was timeless, unbounded, ineffable, beyond language."[6] He told Bartley that he realized: "I had to 'clean up' my life. I had to acknowledge and correct the lies in my life. I saw that the lies that I told about others — my wanting my family, or Ellen (his second wife), or anyone else, to be different from the way that they are -- came from lies that I told about myself -- my wanting to be different from the way that I was.”

“A transformed individual is one who can tell the truth; and a transformed environment is one where the truth can be told.”

“In refining my understanding of the difference between success and satisfaction, and pondering the relationship between the two, it became clearer that Self--which is nonpersonal, nonpositional, nonnarrative--is the source of satisfaction.”

“The moment when you really experience that you have created yourself being whatever way you are, at that same moment you will never have to be that way again.”

“After my experience with Scientology, I saw what it means to see the mind as a machine. I can now operate my mind accordingly, with exactitude. I can do the familiar mind over matter experiments-- the control of pain and bleeding, telepathy, those things.”

“When he started to have affairs, I saw that as a token of my utter inadequacy. I was terribly afraid that he would leave me."[9] Werner Erhard told Bartley he did not wish to undergo the trauma of problems in his second marriage as had happened in his first.”

“If I were to destroy another marriage, I wouldn't be Werner Erhard anymore. I would be the liar Jack Rosenberg. Jack Rosenberg could botch a marriage. Werner Erhard had to do it right.”

“I want to create a context in which government, education, families are nurturing. I want to enable, to empower the institutions of man.”

“I am a sort of revolutionary. I have a strange ambition, though. I don’t want any statues. I don’t want any ordinary monuments. What I want is for the world to work. That’s the monument I want.”

“Ordinary revolution is concerned with social change. It involves resistance. One revolts against something. Whereas a true revolution transcends what one was previously either resisting or submitting to. In this sense I am a revolutionary.”