As a global society, we do not have to agree, endorse or condone the lifestyle choices of others. However, history has taught us that we equally cannot and should not excuse those who would hide behind religion or misuse God’s word to justify bigotry and persecution.

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights.

I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.

My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realising Him.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

No one can say, ‚I have dropped out – I am no longer in the system.‘ When you’re in prison, you’re even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don’t transform the system as an absolute thing.

Lo! The poor Indian, whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

The 21st century is going to be the American century. Because we lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example. That is the history of the journey of America.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

If we depend for our happiness on another, on society or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them, and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.

Music is always a commentary on society.

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine.

The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly ‚cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

I was reared in the church, in the Presbyterian Church.

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning.

Let it be our delight to find our society in the circle of which Jesus is the center, and let us make those our friends who are the friends of Jesus.

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

Faith never makes a confession.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

I respect the fact that many denominations have different points of view with respect to gay marriage and they can hold that in the sanctity in the place of their religion and not bless them or solemnize them.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion.

The mainstream is always under attack.