Most of the utopian community ideas actually are religious. They're based more on the idea of the monastery than the commune.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself

Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.

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.

It's called faith because it's not knowledge.

For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.

Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.