Since the attempt to control nature is at its heart the attempt to control other persons, we can expect societies to be less patient with those cultures which express some degree of indifference to societal goals and values. It is this repeated parallel that brings us to see that the society that creates natural waste creates human waste.

Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished.

I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them." "Yes," said Harriet, "but I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel." "I don't think that matters, provided one doesn't try to persuade one's self into appropriate feelings.

They cultivated normality till it stood out of them all over in knobs, like the muscles upon professional strong men, and scarcely looked normal at all. And they talked interminably and loudly. From their bouncing mental health ordinary ill-balanced mortals shrank in alarm.

The whole question is extraordinarily complicated because of the gulf that has grown up between art on the one hand and on the other hand both the Church and secular society, so that the artists tend to be out of touch with the common man, while the latter, whether Christian or not, has only a very fumbling critical judgment to rely on.

I could not attempt to 'kindle the younger generation with the Gospel,' the most I could do would be to suggest to them that the Christian Faith is a logical explanation of the Universe well worth their attention, and neither an irrational myth nor a system of ethics which will stand by itself when the dogmatic foundation has been removed from beneath it.

Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don't need any sour grapes.

Don't let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth - don't let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency.

I do genuinely believe that the political system is not linear. When it reaches a tipping point fashioned by a critical mass of opinion, the slow pace of change we're used to will no longer be the norm. I see a lot of signs every day that we're moving closer and closer to that tipping point.

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism.

if the church fails to make the shift to apostolic movements again, Christian influence in Western culture will continue to fade, and church attendance will remain in its current trajectory of decline. All we can say in writing this book is, not on our shift! Not if we can help it.