The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

The sheer volume of evidence for survival after death is so immense that to ignore it is like standing at the foot of Mount Everest and insisting that you cannot see the mountain.

It struck me that the popularity of Christmas is a matter of web-like consciousness. Childhood conditions us to relax and expand at Christmas, to forget petty worries and irritations and think in terms of universal peace. And so Christmas is the nearest to mystical experience that most human beings ever approach, with its memories of Dickens and Irving's Bracebridge Hall.

The complex develops out of the simple.

The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.

The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol - brighter than my students at university.

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.