In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.

The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable.

It's amazing how relaxing it is not to claim you know more than you do. I'm surprised that those who claim to speak in the name of god don't take more advantage of this relief.

Plainly, this unwillingness to give ground even on unimportant disagreements is the symptom of some deepseated insecurity, as was my one-time fondness for making teasing remarks (which I amended when I read Anthony Powell's matter-of-fact observation that teasing is an unfailing sign of misery within) and as is my very pronounced impatience. The struggle, therefore, is to try and cultivate the virtuous side of these shortcomings: to be a genial host while only slightly whiffled, for example, or to be witty at the expense of one's own weaknesses instead of those of other people.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.