The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty.

We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing.

Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.

We must love all facts, not for their consequences, but because in each fact God is there present.

Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think ofhimself as a limited and dependent being; and only suffering teaches him this.

Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.

Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.