This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. . . . In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.

We become accomplices in evil every time we seek to soothe the unslakable appetites of the crime family that sits in Pyongyang.

Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.

Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she makes an appearance.

How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in the air which made one think - made me think for many years - that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.