I’m opposed to fundamentalism in any form.

I don’t believe in colleges and universities.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

The power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it.

I just don’t believe in the basic concept that someone should make their whole career in public service.

Communism to me is one-third practice and two-thirds explanation.

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.

The very word ‚secrecy‘ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

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

The making of the far-famed New York Central Park was opposed by even good men, with misguided pluck, perseverance, and ingenuity, but straight right won its way, and now that park is appreciated. So we confidently believe it will be with our great national parks and forest reservations.

A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

When men do not have healthy notions of the Divinity, false ideas supplant them, just as in bad times one uses counterfeit money when there is no good money.

Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.

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

Basically, Islamic State is a combined al Qaeda and Lebanese Hezbollah on steroids, destabilizing the region, dissolving borders/changing the political geography in the Mid-east, and hardening political positions that make Mid-east peace-building more remote by the day.

Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that’s their gift.

A fundamentalist can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality.

We have communion with Christ in His thoughts, views, and purposes; for His thoughts are our thoughts according to our capacity and sanctity. Believers take the same view of matters as Jesus does; that which pleases Him pleases them, and that which grieves His grieves them also.

I will never say something I don’t agree with or believe in… even if the reward is massive!

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

I’m a conservative, but I’m not a nut about it.

My mother always used to say, ‚Well, if you had been born a little girl growing up in Egypt, you would go to church or go to worship Allah, but surely if those people are worshipping a God, it must be the same God‘ – that’s what she always said. The same God with different names.

I don’t think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.

All religions must be tolerated… for every man must get to heaven in his own way.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

Are creeds such simple things like the clothes which a man can change at will and put on at will? Creeds are such for which people live for ages and ages.

I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

I am a Marxist Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.

I have said a hundred times, and I have no inclination to take it back, that I believe there is no right, and ought to be no inclination in the people of the free States to enter into the slave States, and to interfere with the question of slavery at all. I have said that always.

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

The fault lines are shifting from the boundaries of nations into the web of our societies and the streets of our cities. And, terrorism and extremism are a global force that are larger than their changing names, groups, territories and targets.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope… It is not a reflection of all religious people.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

All great peoples are conservative.

There are a lot of self-imposed restrictions by people who somehow believe they have to fall in with a certain military cant. There was always a sense that we had to put things into words that would touch our troops‘ hearts, not just their heads.

I am a Christian and a Democrat, that’s all.

Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.

If ever I expected to come face to face with an angry Christian fundamentalist, it wasn’t in FAO Schwarz.

You don’t see too many atheists on the deathbed. They all start cramming then.

I do not think I could myself be brought to support a man for office whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the Loyal Opposition.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

I’m not a conservative of any kind.

There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11.

I’m going to let God be the judge of who goes to heaven and hell.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

I never saw a contradiction between the ideas that sustain me and the ideas of that symbol, of that extraordinary figure, Jesus Christ.