I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking.

Two radical ideas have been introduced into human thought. One of them is that energy and matter are pretty much the same sort of stuff. That's Einstein. The other is that revenge is a bad idea. Revenge is an enormously popular idea but, of course, Jesus came along with the radical idea of forgiveness. If you're insulted, you have to square accounts. So this invention by Jesus is as radical as Einstein's.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony.

It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane.

Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.