A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands.

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“I count myself a rationalist and a skeptic, and I find myself constantly defending Christians and Christianity…All the things that we value, the right of free speech, the right of the individual conscience, these evolved in first and second century Roman Christendom, where the individual Christian said, ‘I have a right to believe, what I believe and not what the Emperor tells me.’ From that our whole idea of democracy and the equality that we have has developed…We owe Christianity the greatest debt of thanks that a generation can ever have and to slight it and to dismiss it as being irrelevant is the detritus of rather ill read minds, I think.”

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“It’s often noted by people on the left that conservatives don’t understand systemic oppression because they think of everything as an individual case. They fail to accept the larger picture that all of those cases create. I agree with this. But the corollary is that sometimes people who are left of center can fall prey to only seeing the systemic and missing the individual. I’m certainly guilty of that.”

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