...two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary. - Aldous Huxley

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hitler's words — -people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history — -sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being.