The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.

The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.

Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think this frost-fire is a portent somehow: a promise that the continent has given us. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen.

Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.

Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.

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