Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

It hurt the economic historians, the Marxists and the fabians, to admit that the Ten Hour Bill, the basic piece of 19th century legislation, came down from the top, out of aa nobleman's private feelings about the Gospel, or that the abolition of the slave trade was achieved, not through the operation of some "law" of profit and loss, but peurlet as the result of tyhe new humanitarianism of the Evangelicals.

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, and (as a poet has said) "lighthouses erected in the sea of time." They are companions , teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic.

The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.