Age has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and another is, as a rule, enormously exaggerated.

News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.

The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.

You point out that war is only a symptom of the whole horrid business of human behavior, and cannot be isolated. And that, even if we abolish war, we shall not abolish hate and greed. So might it have been argued about slave emancipation, that slavery was but one aspect of human disgustingness, and that to abolish it would not end the barbarity that causes it. But did the abolitionists therefore waste their breath? And do we waste ours now in protesting against war?

[Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster. ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.

Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.

Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.