“How can the human race, whether for selfish or more cosmopolitan ends, understand and control the seemingly blind forces of history?”

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe…”

“What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?”

“Here is Christianity. Whence came it? What is it? It is a force in the world, a prodigious force. It has revolutionized society. It has lifted man out of himself. It has changed the face of the world. There it lies, imbedded in more than eighteen centuries of human history; and history of no mean sort, the best record of the race.”

“How narrow we selfish conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!”

“Selfishness is blind.”

“Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.”

“History is the biography of the human race.”

“You see control can never be a means to any practical end. … Control can never be a means to anything but more control … like Junk.”

“Nothing is more devastating than a life without liberty. A life in which one can be forced into parenthood is just such a life. Rape is among the most profound denials of liberty, and compelling a woman to bear a rapist's child is an assault on her humanity. How different is it to force her to remain pregnant... because efforts at birth control accidentally failed?”