“God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive.”

“What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, its relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God, in terms of what he is not. But my ideas on this subject were always horribly confused, for my knowledge of men was scant and the meaning of being beyond me.”

“There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.”

“Power is the best shield that the disordered personality can conceive against being revealed as the laughing stock he secretly suspects himself to be.”

“There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all.”

“How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other.”