If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.

None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.

All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members.

One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.

No man - prince, peasant, pope - has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!

Well I travelled quite a lot in the east, and one of the things that impressed me greatly was the buddhist notion of the continuity of things, the wheel of life which is what we're talking about, the ever turning wheel.

The fact is that the learning process goes on, and so long as the voices are not stilled and the singers go on singing some of it gets through.