Morris West

"To make that long, last donkey-ride between the pikeman and the stake, to hear the shouting and the chant of hypocrites, to be a spectacle for animals in human masks!"

"It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price…. One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying."

"Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!"

"There are a few of us — madmen all! — who are in love with knowing, who would sell the last shirt from our backs for one small truth, one tiny star-fire to light up the murk and mystery of what we call our life… We may go blind before we see it, thats the haunting —"

"No man — prince, peasant, pope, — has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!"

"Every tribe in the world had its own version of the scapegoat, marked for exile or persecution when the homefolk needed to purge themselves of their own guilts."

"When friends do business, there is no need of contracts. Unfortunately, there are no friends in business."

"Of all the animals in creation, politicians have the shortest memories."

"You are all caught in the current of history whose headwaters rise in the dark mountains of the past. You cannot change it; you survive and help others to survive by adapting to it."

"Religion is the good you do in the bad times."

"[W]hen you get to Rome you have two other rules to learn: never assume that what you see is what is; never believe that what youre told is the whole truth. Its only when youve grasped that — and the Romans know youve grasped it — that you begin to win respect and make progress."

"I wonder how it will read five hundred years from now? — To make a man confess a loving God you burn him!"