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

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.

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.

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!

He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own.

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.

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.