“Yet truth is a diamond; even mishandles, smeared with grease, or buried in mud, it cannot be marred and waits for one with a cloth to polish it clean.”
“I hope it doesn't get worse. But even if it gets worse, I won't regret it. I would rather be dead than live in the factory anymore. Not much difference as they just want you to work to death anyway. And you can't even think there or talk. but I have to think. I have to talk. I have to talk about what I think.”
“Are you insane? You still not convinced that chances are better with me?”
“Outside, most people knew that decades ago, the religious fundamentalists lost the ability to transform society when they became a political movement. Their boycotts and protests were commonplace, any outcry against anything beyond the narrow range of what they saw as biblically acceptable was dismissed as a knee-jerk reaction.”
“We need not deplore the renunciation of historical truth when we put forward rational grounds for the precepts of civilization. The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. Here, too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies . But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels that he has been deceived; and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.”
“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
“Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.”