“The world is miserable because men live beneath themselves; the error of modern man is that he wants to reform the world without having either the will or the power to reform man, and this flagrant contradiction, this attempt to make a better world on the basis of a worsened humanity, can only end in the very abolition of what is human, and consequently in the abolition of happiness too. Reforming man means binding him again to Heaven, reestablishing the broken link; it means tearing him away from the reign of the passions, from the cult of matter, quantity and cunning, and reintegrating him into the world of the spirit and serenity, we would even say: into the world of sufficient reason.”

“To reform the world - means to reform upbringing…”

“To reform society, and with it humanity, there is only one mean; to transform the mentality of men, to direct them ("les orienter", Fr.) in a new spirit.”

“If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man.”

“The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.”

“Opposed to atomism and behaviorism, the systems view of man links him again with the world he lives in, for he is seen as emerging in that world and reflecting its general character.”

“At the core, what Jesus did was to reform the conception of God in the interest of the absolute reality and the moral freedom of men. With this what can be more discordant, what more hostile to it, than the attempt to establish by an appeal to declarative authority doctrines that either contradict the human reason or have no witness from it?”

“What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist see him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of himself. Man simply is.”

“The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.”

“A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.”