I think morality is more important than ever before. As we gain more power, the question of what we do with it becomes more and more crucial, and we are very close to really having divine powers of creation and destruction. The future of the entire ecological system and the future of the whole of life is really now in our hands. And what to do with it is an ethical question and also a scientific question.

I think it's up to the parents to determine whether what they're doing is consigning their child to difficulty. It's not as though they were crippling their children after they were born.

I have found that the greatest stories of acceptance and love and the ugliest stories of hideous cruelty and abuse have equally been perpetrated in the name of Christian faith.

I felt a funeral in my brain, and mourners to and fro kept treading, treading till I felt that sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated, a service, like a drum, kept beating, beating, till I felt my mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again, then space began to toll, as if the heavens were a bell and being were an ear, and I, and silence, some strange race wrecked, solitary, here. Just then, a plank in reason broke, and I fell down and down and hit a world at every plunge, and finished knowing then.

I found myself losing interest in almost everything, I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do and I didn't know why. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.

Psychologically, I will not have to seek far if I decide to kill myself, because in my mind and heart I am more ready for this than for the unplanned daily tribulations that mark off the mornings and afternoons.

The campaign against polygamy, around which a lot of anti-Mormon sentiment was organized, seems horrific to me.