“Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.”

“Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.”

“A questioner asks: If human nature is evil, then where do ritual and rightness come from? I reply: ritual and rightness are always created by the conscious activity of the sages.”

“The fundamental evil of the world arose from the fact that the good Lord has not created money enough.”

“Despair exists only when there is hope.”

“The residents had eliminated both past and future, and for all their activity, they existed in a civilized and eventless world.”

“Since God could have created a freedom in which there could be no evil (i. e., a state when men were happy and free and certain not to sin), it follows that He wished evil to exist. But evil offends Him. A commonplace case of masochism.”

“Consciousness does not just passively reflect the objective material world; it plays an active role in creating reality
itself.”

“One may speculate whether the contemporary idea of American society in decay is not a false notion which has been created, at least partially, by this old movie portrait of a society that was once stable, orderly and governed by the immutable justice of the Hollywood censorship code.
This is the ever-popular myth of a golden age which persuades so many generations that there was once a wonderful moment in the past when the world was sound and good people ruled and evil was justly punished. After Camelot came chaos and despair, except, of course, that Camelot never existed, any more than the world portrayed by those old Hollywood films existed.”

“That existence has meaning, finally, only as the liberty to say No, and by saying No to create a world.”