[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.

History deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men.

Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.

But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

The taboos that I have mentioned are extraordinarily harsh and numerous. They stand around nearly every subject that is genuinely important to man: they hedge in free opinion and experimentation on all sides. Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States, but here the critic is silenced. The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.

The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.