“Life is sacred, that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate.”

As of a Trumpet, 1968, p. 43
As of a Trumpet

Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943), Statement Of Obligations
Context: The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or colour, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.
There is no legitimate limit to the satisfaction of the needs of a human being except as imposed by necessity and by the needs of other human beings. The limit is only legitimate if the needs of all human beings receive an equal degree of attention.

Part IV, Chapter VI
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)

J. Frank Dobie, cited in: United States. Congress Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the … Congress, Vol. 110, part 17. (1964). p. 22821.

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

Sermon Two

The Fifth Sacred Thing (1994), p. i

“The responsibility of writers,” p. 167
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)
Context: Dadaism and surrealism … represented the intoxication of total license, the intoxication in which the mind wallows when it has made a clean sweep of value and surrendered to the immediate. The good is the pole towards which the human spirit is necessarily oriented, not only in action but in every effort, including the effort of pure intelligence. The surrealists have set up non-oriented thought as a model; they have chosen the total absence of value as their supreme value. Men have always been intoxicated by license, which is why, throughout history, towns have been sacked. But there has not always been a literary equivalent for the sacking of towns. Surrealism is such an equivalent.