To what do you not drive human hearts, cursed for craving gold!

Man hovers between Paradise and the Pit.

Damn the Church. Damn it for imposing impossible celibacy on its people. Damn it for hypocrisy--Christendom was littered with priests wallowing in varieties of sin. How many of them were condemned? And damn it for its hatred of women--an abuse of half the world's inhabitants, so that those who refused to be penned into its sheepfold were condemned as harlots and heretics and witches.

A stupid man--the most dangerous animal of all.

To ignore his capacity for evil is as obtuse as blinding oneself to the heights to which he can soar.

It wasn't that she had anything against the faith of the New Testament; left alone, it would be a tender and compassionate religion.... No, what Adelia objected to was the Church's interpretation of God as a petty, stupid, moneygrubbing, retrograde, antediluvian tyrant who, having created a stupendously varied world, had forbidden any inquiry into its complexity, leaving His people flailing in ignorance.

Love, however doomed, had the capacity to attach buoys to the soul.

Truth travels slowly and gets weaker as it goes. Suitable lies are strong and run faster.

The law should be the point at which savagery ended because civilization stood in its path.

Tomorrows were full of awful things. Today, now, was the essential.