James Hillman

I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made.

You don't know what you're going to get into when you follow your bliss.

It's very hard to know what wisdom is.

We're an air bag society that wants guarantees on everything that we buy. We want to be able to take everything back and get another one. We want a 401-k plan and Social Security.

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn't do anything-or that it doesn't do enough.

Futurism is another American myth: whether Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan or Obama, American presidents all come into office with a new program, and the conviction that the country is going to be better than ever.

Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.

We can't change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently.

I don't think anything changes until ideas change. The usual American viewpoint is to believe that something is wrong with the person.

Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.

I know my own deficiencies, one of which is that I had lived away from America for such a long time. It's called expatriate.