Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don't get through or they're returned with 'rejected' scrawled across 'em.

Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be.

This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.

It was wrong to be too pragmatic, to judge people solely by results; it was more humane to judge by intentions.

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

Scientific research? Only when not at the cost of ethics-and first of all, those of the researchers themselves.

Economic growth is not only unncessary, but ruinous.