A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.

Everything Tolstoy wrote is precious, but I found this final statement of the truth about life as he had come to understand it particularly beautiful and moving. 'That is what I have wanted to say to you, my brothers. Before I died.' So he concludes, giving one a vivid sense of the old man, pen in hand and bent over the paper, his forehead wrinkled into a look of puzzlement very characteristic of him, as though he were perpetually wondering how others could fail to see what was to him so clear - that the law of love explained all mysteries and invalidated all other laws.

I think that once you've produced a conformist, a totally conformist society, a society in which there were no critics, that would in fact be an exact equivalent of the totalitarian societies against which we are supposed to be fighting in a cold war.

Sex on the brain is the wrong place to have it.

I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.

The hallmark of religion is to distrust claims made for mortal men. It is in ages of great religious faith that great skepticism can find expression.

Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age.