I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.

Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.

For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.

It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.

An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!

I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.

I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.