A world ends when its metaphor has died.

Our reliance in this country is on the inquiring, individual human mind. Our strength is founded there; our resilience, our ability to face an ever-changing future and to master it. We are not frozen into the backward-facing impotence of those societies, fixed in the rigidness of an official dogma, to which the future is the mirror of the past. We are free to make the future for ourselves.

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.

. . . what humanity most desperately needs is not the creation of new worlds but the recreation in terms of human comprehension of the world we have -- and it is for this reason that arts go on for generation to generation in spite of the fact that Phidias has already carved and Homer has already sung. The creation, we are informed, was accomplished in seven days with Sunday off, but the recreation will never be accomplished because it is always accomplished anew for each generation of living men.

We have learned the answers, all the answers: it is the question that we do not know.

We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.