"The violent extermination of Buddhism in India is legendary. Buddhism grew weaker as it spread wider. The spirit of compromise which breathed in the Xllth Edict of Ashoka that there should be no praising of one's sect and decrying of other sects but on the contrary a rendering of honour to other sects for whatever cause honour may be due to them was its strength and weakness. It accommodated too much. Divinities and heavens slipped into Buddhism from other creeds with the spread of the religion."

"We must respect our own dignity as rational beings and thus diminish the power of fraud. It is better to be free than be a slave, better to know than to be ignorant. It is reason that helps us to reject what is falsely taught and believed about God, that He is a detective officer or a capricious despot or a glorified schoolmaster. It is essential that we should subject religious beliefs to the scrutiny of reason."

"We become more religious in proportion to our readiness to doubt and not our willingness to believe."

"To be ignorant is not the special prerogative of man; to know that he is ignorant is his special privilege."

"We invent by intuition, though we prove by logic."

"We are grown-up infants, and God is a sort of 'wet nurse' to humanity."

"A stone is not self any more than a self is a stone."

"Poets and prophets do not go into committees."