“Man in the struggle for peace, if he is serious about it, if he really knows what it is all about, can only take his task with a sense of humor, even with a certain measure of cynicism.”

“Man struggles for peace, and for other things too, because he is essentially a struggling-caring being - struggling and caring, above everything else, for the integrity of his being.”

“That is why diplomats smile: it is not hypocrisy - it is a sort of metaphysical awareness of the human impossibility of their task.”

“In this fearful age it is not enough to be happy and prosperous and secure yourselves … you must have a message to proclaim to others; you must mean something in terms of ideas and attitudes and fundamental outlook on life; and this something must vibrate with relevance to all conditions of men.”

“Science is insulating man from life - separating his mind from his senses. The worst of it is that it soon anaesthetises his senses so that he doesn't know what he's missing.”

“Objectivism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside of himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man’s problems, the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. This is not easy.”

“Don't you get it? Can you imagine the...the heroism? That's what grace is all about. He didn't even think for one second about himself. All he thought about was that little girl, and saving her life.”