“That was the real sentence imposed upon him, he thought - to discover what idea, what simple idea available to the simplest man, had made mankind accept the doctrines that led it to self-destruction.”

“A man with no one to revere, Julian said, is a man alone.' At that moment, he seemed to consider such loneliness the worst of fates, a sentence he would not have imposed upon the vilest man on earth. And yet, at times, I thought now, he had seemed to impose that very loneliness upon himself.”

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

“Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men accept the idea without a second thought.”

“The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse... To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.”

“Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species.”