The Atlas

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”

“The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.”

“The worst that can possibly have happened to him is death and that we are all in for---if not this morning, then in days, or weeks, or years at most.”

“That God is in truth the sort of bloodthirsty paranoid Who would rend to bits forty-two children for the crime of sassing one of his priests. Don't ask me about the Front Office's policies; I just work here.”

“No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can't or won't entertain.”

“Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness.”

“Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other.”

“If you've got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn't prove it.”

“Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.”

“A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom.”

“It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.”

“People simplify 'Apollonian' into 'mild', and 'calm', and 'cool'. But 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' are two sides of one coin--a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstacy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celebrating the vernal equinox.”

“Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.”

“But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.”

“But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing, I became too stink in’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down degrees.”