"'Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless.’ – Bertrand Russell, atheist"

2nd header quotation in Rick Warren The Purpose-Driven Life Chapter 1

"'Do you believe in God, Winston?' ‘No.’ ‘Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?’ ‘I don’t know. The spirit of Man.’ ‘And do you consider yourself a man?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors.'"

O'Brien and Winston Smith in George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four

"'Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save to lie down and die!'"

Hester Prynne in Nathanial Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter, quoted in William J. Bennett The Book of Virtues

"If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat."
St. Paul, 2 Thessalonians 3:10

"The main impulse of a true genius is not to look into himself, with endless digging into his conscience and subconscious - as Pasternak said, ‘conscience is like the headlights of a car; their light directed outward illuminates the way, directed inward leads to catastrophe’ - but to look out of himself. And to give. And if the main impulse of your existence is the desire to give, you cannot really be a nasty character. That’s what, probably, Pushkin had in mind when he exclaimed in his Mozart and Salieri: 'Genius and villainy are incompatible.'"

Chronicles magazine 1/88 [again I had regrettably not yet in 1988 acquired the habit of recording the author as well as publication when I recorded points I considered noteworthy]

“I find it enormously interesting that this approach [that the law is what the sovereign commands] to finding a replacement for a transcendental source of values involves, in effect, a redirection of metaphorical energy: to find a human equivalent for God, there is a focus not on God’s goodness, but on his Power. It makes sense.”

Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal Vol. 1979 #6