“Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.”

Born For Love (1994)

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. xxvi

Source: On the Mystical Body of Christ, p.435

Varanasi 5th Public Talk (28 November 1964), The Collected Works, Vol. XV
1960s
Context: You know, actually we have no love — that is a terrible thing to realize. Actually we have no love; we have sentiment; we have emotionality, sensuality, sexuality; we have remembrances of something which we have thought as love. But actually, brutally, we have no love. Because to have love means no violence, no fear, no competition, no ambition. If you had love you will never say, "This is my family." You may have a family and give them the best you can; but it will not be "your family" which is opposed to the world. If you love, if there is love, there is peace. If you loved, you would educate your child not to be a nationalist, not to have only a technical job and look after his own petty little affairs; you would have no nationality. There would be no divisions of religion, if you loved. But as these things actually exist — not theoretically, but brutally — in this ugly world, it shows that you have no love. Even the love of a mother for her child is not love. If the mother really loved her child, do you think the world would be like this? She would see that he had the right food, the right education, that he was sensitive, that he appreciated beauty, that he was not ambitious, greedy, envious. So the mother, however much she may think she loves her child, does not love the child. So we have not that love.

Source: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

As quoted in "Stupidity should be cured, says DNA discoverer", by Shaoni Bhattacharya, New Scientist (28 February 2003) http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3451#.VHpLJzGsWPY.