The doctrine that might makes right has covered the earth with misery. While it crushes the weak, it also destroys the strong. Every deceit, every cruelty, every wrong, reaches back sooner or later and crushes its author. Justice is moral health, bringing happiness, wrong is moral disease, bringing mortal death.

Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.

When the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only in appearance. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.

I could not understand why men who knew all about good and evil could hate and kill each other.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

The subjects I wanted to write about - the mystery of the human soul, evil - didn't interest newspapers, and news reporting bored me.