Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose.

It is not through the way in which someone speaks about God that I can see whether that person has passed through the crucible of Divine Love, but through the way the person speaks to me about things here on earth.

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

What is surprising is not that oppression should make its appearance only after higher forms of economy have been reached, but that it should always accompany them.