The aim of all education is, or should be, to teach people to educate themselves.

Nothing fails like success when you rely on it too much.

History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff - well, it might as well be dead.

The world's greatest need . . . is mutual confidence. No human being ever knows all the secrets of another's heart. Yet there is enough confidence between mother and child, husband and wife, buyer and seller . . . to make social life a practical possibility. Confidence may be risky, but it is nothing like so risky as mistrust.

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.

On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.