In science, as in love, a concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence.

One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism

A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.

Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.

Unlike puppets we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first steps towards freedom.

If you are good for nothing else, you can still serve as a bad example.

In acute suffering the need for meaning is as strong or stronger than the need for happiness.

Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.

He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality.

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

Religion is the human attitude towards a sacred order that includes within it all being-human or otherwise-i.e., belief in a cosmos, the meaning of which both includes and transcends man.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

The ceiling is not a good limit

If a man wants love he should correct his weaknesses, or his flaws, and he may deserve it. But he cannot expect the unearned, either in love or in money; either in matter or in spirit.

The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.

I thought I had swell ideas, and wonderful musicians, but the hell of it, no one else did.

You've forgotten those June nights at the Riviera...the night I drank Champagne from your slipper - two quarts. It would have been more but you were wearing inner soles.

Success is the enemy of comedy.

To understand the limitation of things, desire them.

The laws of physics ... seem to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design... The universe must have a purpose.

Philosophy is a bad master for poetry; religion worse; and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.