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.

There are still things I want to do but they're not necessary for me to do. I'm not clinging to anything that I can't open my hands and let go.

There was no cure for the human condition because every man read the present and plotted the future in the light of his own past.

And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.

I look out this window and think this is a cosmos, this is a huge creation, this is one small corner of it. The trees and the birds and everything else and I am part of it. I didn't ask to be put here. I've been lucky finding myself here.

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.