The whole point of view of the anarchist is that everything must start from the bottom up, from man. It seems to me so human a philosophy.

Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it.

Poverty is a strange and elusive thing. ... I condemn poverty and I advocate it; poverty is simple and complex at once; it is a social phenomenon and a personal matter. Poverty is an elusive thing, and a paradoxical one. We need always to be thinking and writing about it, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

There is something so horrifying and so sad when people are living alone. That is why the old and lonely come to us.

The Sexual Revolution is a complete rebellion against authority, natural and supernatural, even against the body and its needs, its natural functions of child bearing. This is not reverence for life, it is a great denial and more resembles Nihilism than the revolution that they think they are furthering.

Castro wasn't a Marxist. He was a Catholic educated by the Christian Brothers and the Jesuits. But fundamentally, I'm not talking about practising Catholics, but rather about something which is inbred; that is, a part of your country, your heritage, your life.

One of the disconcerting facts about the spiritual life is that God takes you at your word.