Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is a man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer.

As long as a tree is a tree, it is a top-heavy monster with a hundred arms, a thousand tongues, and only one leg. But so long as a tree is a tree, it does not frighten us at all. It begins to be something alien, to be something strange, only when it looks like ourselves. When a tree really looks like a man our knees knock under us. And when the whole universe looks like a man we fall on our faces.

Science has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

It is assuredly well to remember that [Christ] would quite certainly have been moved on by the police and almost certainly arrested by the police, for having no visible means of subsistence. For our law has in it a turn of humor or touch of fancy which Nero and Herod never happened to think of; that of actually punishing homeless people for not sleeping at home.

We may think [Christianity] an incredible or impossible ideal; but we cannot think it any more incredible or impossible than [First century Jews, Romans and Greeks] would have thought it. In other words, whatever else is true it is not true that the controversy has been altered by time. Whatever else is true, it is emphatically not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to his time, but are no longer suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable they were to his time is perhaps suggested in the end of his story.