It requires something more than personal experience to gain a philosophy or point of view from any specific event. It is the quality of our response to the event and our capacity to enter into the lives of others that help us to make their lives and experiences our own. In my own case my convictions have derived and developed from events in the lives of others as well as from my own experience. What I have seen meted out to others by authority and repression, economic and political, transcends anything I myself may have endured.

The majority cannot reason; it has no judgement. It has always placed its destiny in the hands of others; it has followed its leaders even into destruction. The mass has always opposed, condemned, and hounded the innovator, the pioneer of a new truth.

What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!

Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: "Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.

What's wrong with lust? You fancy your neighbor's husband so what are you supposed to do? Poke your eyes out so that you can't see him anymore? Acting on it is maybe a sin ... but my God, just lusting after someone? Is that so bad?

Salvation lies in an energetic march onward towards a brighter and clearer future.

The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven.