“Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.”

“Civilization is but a thin veneer stretched across the passions of the human heart. And civilization doesn't just happen; we have to make it happen.”

“When you have an organization that's neither political nor religious and doesn't take part in the civil rights struggle, what can it call itself? It's in a vacuum.”

“The existence of God, I discovered one day, is not a problem. Whether he exists or not doesn't affect us; in the slightest, and there is no reason to worry about something that doesn't affect us. But religion on the other hand does affect us; it stuck its pointed nose into even the most hidden depths of our lives. Like an invisible policeman, it had tried to keep our existence under surveillance, to regulate with its cruel, cold, hypocritical logic. As Jupiter castrated Saturn, so the church has tried to castrate all of us.”

“Life has been dealt to us flawed; doesn't mean we have to like it all the time, but live it and make the best of it to our greatest ability.”

“Most of us, in our civilized society, rely too heavily on reasoning capacity to make things happen. We've been raised to believe that logic will prevail. Logic, in and of itself, will rarely influence people. Most often logic doesn't work.”