A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

I took the vow of celibacy in 1906. I had not shared my thoughts with my wife until then, but only consulted her at the time of making the vow. She had no objection.

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.

The fact is I am not having sex. But I feel absolutely ripe for the, what would you say? plucking?

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.

Don’t join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

I have seen how leaders rule by intimidation. Leaders who demonize and dehumanize entire groups of people often do so because they have nothing else to offer. And I have seen how places that stifle the voices and dismiss the potential of their citizens are diminished: how they are less vital, less hopeful, less free.

I’m a reverend and a pastor. A pastor of the church. I go by usually pastor.

If, hypothetically, Western Catholicism were to review the issue of celibacy, I think it would do so for cultural reasons, not so much as a universal option.

In the Western Church to which I belong, priests cannot be married as in the Byzantine, Ukrainian, Russian or Greek Catholic Churches. In those churches, the priests can be married, but the bishops have to be celibate. They are very good priests.

The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials.

From my childhood I had been intended for the clergy. This prospect hung like a dark cloud on my mind.