Evil is a fact, not to be explained away, but to be accepted; and accepted, not to be endured, but to be conquered.

When I say God it is poetry and not theology. Nothing that any theologian has written about God has helped me much, but everything the poets have written about flowers and birds and skies and seas and saviors of the race, and God - whoever He may be - has at one time or another reached my soul!...The theologians gather dust upon the shelves of my library but the poets are stained with my fingers and blotted by my tears.

The thought of immortality is as well founded as any other well authenticated postulate of the human reason.

Priests are no more necessary to religion than politicians are to patriotism.

Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself - at the expense of the new demands of each new generation.

If Christians were Christians, there would be no anti-Semitism. Jesus was a Jew. There is nothing that the ordinary Christian so dislikes to remember as this awkward historical fact.

No one is wise enough, no nation is important enough, no human interest is precious enough, to justify the wholesale destruction and murder which constitute the science of war.