“The one thing that is truly monstrous is the idea of another person being unreachable. I think this is what lies behind our fear of people we imagine to be evil: the belief that they are wholly beyond our reach, beyond our appeal and our compassion, because they have alienated themselves completely from the rest of humanity and thereby rendered themselves inhuman. . . . But there is mutuality involved. For us to accept another person’s alienation is simultaneously to alienate ourselves from him—to become complicit. When we decide to accept that another person is unreachable, we may cut him off, send him away, but we have set ourselves adrift as well.”

“A man is a free being who is always changing into himself. This changing is never merely indifferent. We are always getting either better or worse. Our development is measured by our acts of free choice, and we make ourselves by the patterns of our desires.If our desires reach out for the things that we were created to have and to make and to become, then we will develop into what we were truly meant to be.But if our desires reach out for things that have have no meaning for the growth of our spirit, if they lose themselves in dreams or passions or illusions, we will be false to ourselves and to other men and to God. We will judge ourselves as aliens and exiles from ourselves and from God.In hell, there is no recollection. The damned are exiled not only from God and from other men, but even from themselves.”

“Sometimes we do that to ourselves -- we pit our desires against one another. We insist unnecessarily on seeing one aspect of our personality as being at odds with the rest of ourselves. ”

“honor our sense of right and wrong-- our sense of what others need from us and how we ought to act towards them... Because we go against this sense-- because we fail to act as we feel we should-- that we grow resentful and feel alienated. We convince ourselves that others are making our lives intolerable. On the other hand, when we treat them as we feel we should, we have no occasion to feel this way. We can care openly for them because caring, not selfishness, is our "natural" condition (in computer jargon, our "default setting"). We alienate ourselves from theirs when we compromise our integrity, and we care for them when we don't.”

“We will not find security for ourselves if we are estranged from the other people of this world and alienated from them and their cultures. We will not find peace for ourselves and our children by continuing to ignore other people and by arrogantly insisting that the rest of the world must learn from us what we are willing to teach and must speak to us only in our tongue.”

“Seeking out people with different views, different perspectives, different ideas is often challenging, because it requires us to set aside judgment and open our minds. But we have to remind ourselves that to get beyond where we are, where I believe most of us are, we would all be be well served to choose our music carefully, to stop talking and listen to one another.”