Great Throughts Treasury

"Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war but on the love of peace."

"Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality."

"Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful...Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple--though it is that too, much to its glory--it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in and century out, have concurred, each in his own way....speaking of crutches--Freud can be a crutch, Marx can be a crutch, rationalism can be a crutch, and atheism can be two canes and a pair of iron braces. We none of us have all the answers, nor are we likely to have. But in the country of the halt, the man who is surest he has no limp may be the worst-crippled."

"Some people think that all the equipment you need to discuss religion is a mouth. "

"The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns."