All this talk about atheistic materialism and God-fearing American I think is beside the point; it's a rather vapid form of religion.

The intimate relation between humor and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence, which threaten the very meaning of our life.

The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.

The history of mankind is a perennial tragedy; for the highest ideals which the individual may project are ideals which he can never realize in social and collective terms.

Religion mustn't interfere with the state - so one of the basic Democratic principles as we know it in America is the separation of church and state.

Aim for the stars and maybe you'll reach the sky.

That is one of the flagrant misconceptions about Catholicism in America that if a man is a Catholic he owes allegiance to what they say a foreign sovereign, or something like that.