“If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.”

“The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. (“Tomorrow”)”

“The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.”

“But why do some people support [the heretics]?" "Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power." "Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?" "That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong.”

“Two contrary reasons. We must begin with that, otherwise we cannot understand anything and everything is heretical. And even at the end of each truth we must add that we are bearing the opposite truth in mind.”

“Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.[...]We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.”