[The child's] great task is freeing himself from the parents... only after this detachment is accomplished can he cease to be a child and so become a member of the social community.

[the Church] perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves... the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus

[The Civil War was really a] social cataclysm in which the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government, the planting aristocracy of the South.

[the German anti-Semitic campaign] is aimed, essentially, not at the Jews at all, or at them exclusively. It is aimed at Europe and at the real spirit of Germany.

[The Great Gatsby—] a story of class warfare in a nation that denies it even has a class system, in which the game is eternally rigged for the rich to win.

[The Great Gatsby] seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James

[The Shambhala teachings are] a manual for people who have lost the principles of sacredness, dignity, and warriorship in their lives.

[The Tao] unites the world into one whole.

[There is] one principle of all things, of which there has always been one and the same knowledge among all peoples.

[Virgil—] That harmonious plagiary and miserable flatterer, whose cursed hexameters were drilled into me at Harrow.

[Virgil] The Delight of all Ages, and the Pattern of all Poets.

[We are] victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.

[We do not]... blame, but rather pity, in our innermost heart, the 'wise men' of our age for trying to carry out the only policy that will keep them on the pinnacle of their 'authority'; as they could not, if even they would, act otherwise and preserve their prestige with the masses, or escape from being speedily outcast by their colleagues.

[We live in a world] whose rhetoric is advertising, whose standard of living has become its morality

[We need to] recapture and re-emphasize and bring to bear upon present problems the wisdom that lies in the work of our greatest thinkers

[We] must all work to keep our precious birthright of individualism and freedom from these institutions (church, army, aristocracy, royalty). Every great institution is perforce a means of corruption.

[When asked ‘Why don’t you try practicing Zen?’] Touzi said, ‘Fancy food doesn’t interest someone who’s full.’

[When asked, 'Of all the characters populating The Story of Civilization, whom wold you have most like to have known,' he answered] Madame De Pompadour... she was beautiful, she was charming, she was luscious—what else do you want?

[Whitman's] all-embracing words lock arms with workers and farmers, Negroes and whites, Asiatics and Europeans, serfs, and free men, beaming democracy to all

[William] refused altogether to follow his brother Henry into fastidious snobbishness.