The Range of Reason (1952), p. 113.
The Lessons of History (1968), p. 72 (co-authored with Ariel Durant)
"Eckhart, Brethren of the Free Spirit" http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/communalism2.htm from Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (1974), ch. 4
Context: St. Francis is not only the most attractive of all the Christian saints, he is the most attractive of Christians, admired by Buddhists, atheists, completely secular, modern people, Communists, to whom the figure of Christ himself is at best unattractive. Partly this is due to the sentimentalization of the legend of his life and that of his companions in the early days of the order. Many people today who put his statue in their gardens know nothing about him except that he preached a sermon to the birds, wrote a hymn to the sun, and called the donkey his brother. These bits of information are important because they are signs of a revolution of the sensibility — which incidentally was a metaphysical revolution of which certainly St. Francis himself was quite unaware. They stand for a mystical and emotional immediate realization of the unity of being, a notion foreign, in fact antagonistic, to the main Judeo-Christian tradition.
“I am that I am” — the God of Judaism is the only self-sufficient being. All the reality that we can know is contingent, created out of nothing, and hence of an inferior order of reality. Faced with the “utterly other,” the contingent soul can finally only respond with fear and trembling.
p. xiii http://books.google.com/books?id=KsI3sswEg14C&pg=PR13&dq=%22you+don't+have+to+be+brave+or+a+saint%22
2010s, God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales (2011)
Source: God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales
Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000), p. 313
Of Sir Richard Jebb, Some Cambridge Dons of the Nineties (1956)
1950s
Patanjali in Ashtanga Yoga Sutra I.14, in Ashtanga Yoga: Practice & Philosophy http://books.google.co.in/books?id=f9ygWu2xM3QC&pg=PA154, p. 154.
On Martin Luther King, Jr.
America The Beautiful (2010)
Source: Heart of Darkness
80
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)
Source: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 11 : The Humanity of the Rebel
Context: The authentic rebel knows that the silencing of all his adversaries is the last thing on earth he wishes: their extermination would deprive him and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies — being human — also have and could share with him. If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of man. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with our enemies, we are the poorer.
