If they are intelligent they won't be ambitious at all. If they are intelligent they would like to live a very simple and ordinary life in tune with nature, in harmony with existence, with trees, with birds, with animals, with people. They would not like to dominate anyone or be dominated by anyone. They would like to live together in friendliness, not as masters or slaves.

There can never be a friendship between the owner and the owned, the boss and the servant, the leader and the led. There can never be any friendship. Friendship can happen only when there is a very subtle undeclared form of equality - not the equality communism talks about, because that is politics, that is forced equality.

-Rajneesh

I am reminded of a story. A great politician had developed a tumor in his brain, perhaps a canceric growth. It was a very complicated operation, his whole brain had to be taken out. He was lying down on the table; it was a long and very delicate operation. The doctors were operating on the brain in another room. When the operation was over, they came back to take the politician ... he was missing! "My God, where has he gone?"

The nurse said, "A man came running and he said, 'You have been chosen the president.' The patient stood up and started walking. I tried to prevent him, I said, 'Your brain is in the surgery, and they are working on it.' He said, 'Now that I am the president I don't need the brain. Let them work on it. Whenever I need it I will come, but at least for five years forget all about it. I am the president; brains are needed by small people, nobodies. Where is the need for brains for a man who has risen to the highest post?'"

The whole of history proves it, that politicians have been the most idiotic people around. But the strange fact is that the more idiotic the politician is, the more possibility there is for his success.

-Rajneesh

In the East a statue is not made for its own sake. It is made as a code language for centuries to follow. Scriptures may disappear, languages may change, words may be interpreted. Doctrines can be wrongly interpreted, commented upon. There may be dispute about theories - and there has been - so they thought there must be a different way than language.

Now what dispute can there be about the statue of a Buddha or Mahavira? There is no question of dispute, there is no need of any commentary. Anybody who is capable of sitting silently by the side of this statue will have a certain thing stirred in his heart. This is objective art.

-Rajneesh

According to the Western historians, Sanskrit also reached to its ultimate peak of refinement in some prehistorical age; since then there has been no change. Not that they are against change; you cannot change it because it has been refined to the very last. All the finishing touches were done five thousand years ago.

People were scientific, but their devotion was to human growth - in music, in art, in poetry, in drama, in dance.

In India there are so many schools of dance, centuries old; so many schools of music, centuries old.

And the teaching of dance or drama is not the way it is in the West; it is very religious. The man who teaches you drama, dance, music, is as much respected as a master is. And he is a Master, because music is not only music; it is, deep down, meditation. It is music used for meditation.

You may have come to learn music; you will return with something more, something more precious than you have every imagined. Music of course you will learn, but side by side something will start growing in you which is far more musical, which is the music of silence.

-Rajneesh

We have enough evidence that at the time of Mahabharata - which happened three thousand years before Jesus Christ - something like nuclear weapons were used. So it is not that science had not developed - but it was prevented; its direction was changed.

Seeing its destructiveness, seeing that it is against ecology, seeing that sooner of later it would destroy humanity itself ... all scientific movement was directed into other dimensions. For example, yoga, tantra, ayurveda - these are all scientific methods, but not against nature, not against man; they are creative.

-Rajneesh