As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.

No one culture has ever developed all human potentialities; it has always selected certain capacities, mental and emotional and moral, and stifled others. Each culture is a system of values which may well complement the values in another.

In a day of footloose movements of people and of mixed marriages in the ancestry of the most desirable elements of the community we preach unabashed the gospel of the pure race.

Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the enormous malleability of their original endowment. They are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born. It does not matter whether, with the Northwest Coast, it requires delusions of self-reference, or with our own civilization the amassing of possessions. In any case the great mass of individuals take quite readily the form that is presented to them.

I have always used the world of make-believe with a certain desperation.

Racism remains in the eyes of history ... merely another instance of the persecution of minorities for the advantage of those in power.

Society in its full sense ... is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.