“What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.”

“...'fundamentalism' and 'liberalism' and terrorism.' These labels only tell us partial truths. We must use them humbly, guardedly, Niebuhr would say, aware of the limitations of our own vision and of our own capacity for misunderstanding and self-deception.”

“The most frightening thing in the world is our own self.”

“This is what a self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.”

“[As] authorities "over" us are removed, as we wobble out on our own, the question of whether to be or not to be arises with real relevance for the first time, since the burden of being is felt most fully by the self-determining self.”

“A friend is a second self, so that our consciousness of a friend's existence...makes us more fully conscious of our own existence.”