
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 16
Uncommon Knowledge (2005)
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 16
“Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them.”
The Quality You Need Most, from Green Book Magazine (April 1914)
Cited (earlier) in: American Women Composers (1979) AWC news. Volumes 2-3. p. 41
Beauty is Revolution (1980)
The Unseen Assassins https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.216538/page/n49 (1932), p. 48; in later variants, "pity" was misquoted as "piety" in the Naval War College Review, Vol. 10 (1957), p. 27, and some internet citations have compressed "has become, for the European of our age" to read "has become for our age".
“The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.”
As quoted in New Scientist (February 1993), p. 42
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: I want you to understand what has been done in the world to force men to think alike. It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike. Why did he not do so? Why did he make your brain so that you could not by any possibility be a Methodist? Why did he make yours so that you could not be a Catholic? And why did he make the brain of another so that he is an unbeliever — why the brain of another so that he became a Mohammedan — if he wanted us all to believe alike?
After all, maybe Nature is good enough and grand enough and broad enough to give us the diversity born of liberty. Maybe, after all, it would not be best for us all to be just the same. What a stupid world, if everybody said yes to everything that everybody else might say.
The most important thing in this world is liberty. More important than food or clothes — more important than gold or houses or lands — more important than art or science — more important than all religions, is the liberty of man.
“What is more important in a library than anything else — is the fact that it exists.”
"The Premise Of Meaning" in American Scholar (5 June 1972)
im Gespräch mit Hans Küng über den Weltethos, 2007, YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S4KhE6nzzQ#t=5m8s