A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe.

It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.

...we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.

A man may have strong humanitarian and democratic principles, but if he happens to have been brought up as a bath-taking, shirt-changing lover of fresh air, he will have to overcome certain physical repugnance before he can bring himself to put those principles into practice.

On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny.