"Nature has done well and wisely, in not permitting a man to live forever and in bringing into the world ever new generations. An old person is a used-up machine has too many dogmas to easily believe in a new truth ; too many sympathies and antipathies for him to come to love something unfamiliar; too many habits to be able to settle on new ways. Let us add suspiciousness — the fruit of bitter experiences; a pessimism inseparable from all manner of disappointments; and finally, a general decline of powers from exhaustion ."

"Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually, genuinely desiring peace. War is the outcome, not mainly of evil intentions, but on the whole, of good intentions…"

"The enthusiasm was based on pure love and love of what we were doing."

"For Leopardi evil is integral to the way the world works; but when he talks of evil he does not mean any kind of malign agency of the sort that Gnostics imagined. Evil is the suffering that is built i…"

"a youth in his twenty third year, young of his age, who had seen little or nothing of the world, who resigned himself to politics, but whose desire had been for the ministry of God. The remains of thi…"