Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.

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

Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.

. . . 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.

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

Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them; new and born and fresh and wonderful.

There are those, I know, who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream.