It is not easy to tear any event out of the context of the universe in which it occurred without detaching from it some factor that influenced it.

A community is made up of intimate relationships among diversified types of individuals--a kinship group, a local group, a neighborhood, a village, a large family.

The instrument of expansion of Classical civilization was a social organization, slavery.

The very idea that there is some kind of conflict between science and religion is completely mistaken. Science is a method for investigating experience... Religion is the fundamental, necessary internalization of our system of more permanent values.

No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything.

The hope for the twentieth century rests on recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding a increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self discipline.

A civilization is complicated, in the first place, because it is dynamic; that is, it is constantly changing in the passage of time, until it has perished.