man’s ingenuity in dealing with difficult problems was unlimited, making irrelevant those so-called "deeper issues" of his spiritual life with which religion and philosophy pretended to deal. - P75
The trouble with my new humanism, I found myself deciding, was not its confidence in human science and technology. It was rather its naive and unrealistic faith in the rationality and goodness of the men who wielded these instruments. - P75
I began to see that without moral health, a community is as helpless and lost as it is without material supplies and services. - P76
A marginal existence neither improves men nor makes them wicked; it places a premium on every action, and in doing so reveals the actual inward character that every man has always possessed. - P92
When, however, the point at issue was not an hour’s work but a basic condition of life—such as the space a man lived in or the amount of food he had to eat—then this good will tended to recede and in most cases to disappear. - P92
Rational behavior in communal action is primarily a moral and not an intellectual achievement, possible only to a person who is morally capable of self-sacrifice. In a real sense, I came to believe, moral selflessness is a prerequisite for the life of reason—not its consequence, as so many philosophers contend. - P93
Next to space, food was the necessity in very short supply. - P96
Wealth is a dynamic force that can too easily become demonic—for if it does not do great good, it can do great harm. - P105
Weihsien camp’s greatest difficulties with law and order had to do not so much with the justice as with the strength of its laws. The main problem was the political one of generating governmental power, rather than of ruling with wisdom and justice—though that was by no means easy. - P141
A moral disease such as stealing could have the same disintegrating effect on our utilities that a case of bubonic plague has on the human anatomy. - P147
A community needs ethical people, but does the secular world need religious people? Are the saints really good, is religious piety a requisite for communal virtue, do we need God in order to love our fellow man? These questions occurred to me with increasing frequency as the deep significance of the moral dimension of life came clear to me. I looked around to find enlightenment. - P163
The most important lesson I learned is that there are no cut-and-dried categories in human life, no easily recognizable brand names by which we can estimate our fellows. Over and over "respectable people," one of the commonest labels applied in social intercourse, turned out to be uncooperative, irritable, and worse, dishonest. - P163
Considering the difficulty of cataloging people in neat pigeon-holes, it was not strange that there were also innumerable surprises in the behavior of the religious ones among us. - P168
Besides personal integrity, the deepest spiritual problem an internment camp encounters is that of "meaning." This word can signify many diverse things. There is the semantic and logical problem of the meaning of words, symbols, and propositions, with which recent philosophy has so much concerned itself. There is also the existential problem of the meaning of life. - P193
For even saintly folk will act like sinners Unless they have their customary dinners. —BERTOLT BRECHT, The Threepenny Opera
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