In AA’s first years, I all but ruined the whole undertaking with…unconscious arrogance. God as I understood him had to be for everybody. Sometimes my aggression was subtle and sometimes it was crude. But either way, it was damaging — perhaps fatally so — to numbers of nonbelievers…. Even now, I catch myself chanting some old barrier-building refrain: “Do as I do, believe as I do — or else!”

Bill Wilson, AA Grapevine, April 1961