It Could Be True

     A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly the lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrevelent in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., from "Address to Graduating Class at Bennington College, 1970," in Wampeters, Foma and Grandfalloons, p. 166.

....The less punishment, the less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary respectible, commonplace people would be if they had not enough to eat. When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist....
— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Other Essays, p. 243.

....Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
— Oscar Wilde, Ibid., p. 246.

....The public has always, and in every age been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference....
— Oscar Wilde, Ibid., p. 247.

Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysis, Krishna, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light — and in the best of cases the fullness of light — in the heart of that same religious tradition.
— Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest, from Article #8, p. 29.