“Human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.”

Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn’t burn up any fossil fuel, doesn’t pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

The Samoan puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and believes that women need more initiating, more time for maturing of sexual feeling. A man who fails to satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy, inept blunderer.

Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.

The need to find meaning is as real as the need for trust and for love, for relations with other human beings.

In almost any society I think, the quality of the nonconformists is likely to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

Injustice experienced in the flesh, in deeply wounded flesh, is the stuff out of which change explodes.

We must have a place where children can have a whole group of adults they can trust.

Contentment can be bought at a price that one can not possibly pay.

Throughout history, females have picked providers for males. Males pick anything.

Monogamous heterosexual love is probably one of the most difficult, complex and demanding of human relationships.

What the world needs is not romantic lovers who are sufficient unto themselves, but husbands and wives who live in communities, relate to other people, carry on useful work and willingly give time and attention to their children.

The assumption that men were created equal, with an equal ability to make an effort and win an earthly reward, although denied every day by experience, is maintained every day by our folklore and our daydreams.

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.

A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.

Right now it feels like we’re playing a role, like me and a couple of my friends, in where popular culture is going. That’s a very rare thing in a person’s life to be able to be a part of that. It’s a responsibility I take seriously.

The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality

It is – last stage of all When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man

I can imagine no greater misfortune for a cultured people than to see in the hands of the rulers not only the civil, but also the religious power.

Style … is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.