Great Throughts Treasury

"We shall never stop war, whatever machinery we may devise, until we have learned to think always, with a sort of desperate urgency and an utter self-identification, of single human beings."

"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human understanding, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views."

"There is an intellectual beauty about the completeness of the vacuum which separates zonal desires and necessities on the one hand from the impersonal operation of the reparations machine, positive and negative, on the other. Aeons (as it seems) ago there was some connection between the two: for the whole thing started with a tentative list of ‘war potential’ and ‘surplus’ firms and factories put up by the zone. That list has now acquired an independent robot’s existence: bit by bit... comes crashing like some giant stupid steamroller into the zone."

"People talk, or used to talk, of the mission of Israel. This mission, if it exists, is not to blow up people in Palestine; our mission is, just because we have been specially insulted and outraged for 1,900 years or more, to be specially ready for reconciliation. I say this in no spirit of criticism of those, whether they be Jews or Frenchmen or Czechs or Poles, whose sons or wives or lovers have suffered such agony and shame that even now one dares not think of it, and who can therefore neither forget nor forgive. I understand very well the thoughts and feelings that are their daily portion. But just because this awful legacy of hatred is, for our poor humanity, all but inevitable, so much the more incumbent it is upon those of us who have suffered only vicariously, if at all, to balance their bitterness by our well-wishing."

"I think the rapidly growing tendency to regard animals as born for nothing except slavery to so-called humanity is absolutely disgusting."