People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place.

I regard myself to have been a young Trostkyite and I have not a single bitter memory.

The really difficult moral issues arise, not from a confrontation of good and evil, but from a collision between two goods

If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without ... let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine - for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish.

What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.

Somehow, the fact that more poor people are on welfare, receiving more generous payments, does not seem to have made this country a nice place to live - not even for the poor on welfare, whose condition seems not noticeably better than when they were poor and off welfare. Something appears to have gone wrong; a liberal and compassionate social policy has bred all sorts of unanticipated and perverse consequences.

I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.