If the cultural elite has its way, the U.S. will be much more like Europe

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.

No man is crushed by misfortune unless he has first been deceived by prosperity

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.

Avoid being narrow-minded

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

The history of human consciousness is marked by the battle between the old awareness, the ways of fear, and the new awareness, the ways of love.

Success does not come to the most righteous and rigorously disciplined but to those who continue running.

Different cultures have different audiences.

Almost as many inhumanities are committed in the name of love as in the name of religion.

If I'm going to break them, I'm going to break them both.