In America, communities existed before governments. There were many groups of people with a common sense of purpose and a feeling of duty to one another before there were political institutions.

We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.

But rather that we should lose our sense that neither can become the other, that the traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lense and the Cinerama screen tend to narrow it.

History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.

When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.

Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations.

No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.