If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.

The average American never loses his sleep about affairs which relate to his society and to our whole country.

The most important things we talk about on Sundays are things to which we pay very little attention.

Knowing means to penetrate through the surface, in order to arrive at the roots, and hence the causes; knowing means to "see" reality in its nakedness. Knowing does not mean to be in the possession of the truth; it means to penetrate the surface and to strive critically and actively in order to approach truth ever more closely.

Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair.

Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.

The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period.