It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State ...approval.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those who marry God can become domesticated too--it's just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word "Love" means a forma...l touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and "Ave Maria" like "dearest" is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world's marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves--it was God's taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has j...udged by the laws of chance--so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same ...faith under another mask?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism ... is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a... politique.... Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nobody thinks in terms of "human beings." Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk abo...ut the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Italy, for thirty years, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leo...nardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, and they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »