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

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

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.

And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.

Laughter is man’s most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humour, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element belongs to man

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

I just wanted to do something that had some meaning that I can look back and be proud of, that my family can look back and be proud of.

A mind that is conscious of its integrity scorns to say more than it means to perform.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.

Agnostic is the Greek word, for the Latin word, for ignorant.

No birth is an accident, No experience is without meaning, and no life is without value.

The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

It’s not the imbalances of life that will get you down-it’s doing meaningless things that aren’t taking you where you want to go.