It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world.

destruction is easy for humans but creation is too difficult.

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

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

Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.

The American experience stirred mankind from discovery to exploration. From the cautious quest for what they knew (or thought they knew) was out there, into an enthusiastic reaching to the unknown. These are two substantially different kinds of human enterprise.

Our discontent begins by finding false villains whom we can accuse of deceiving us. Next we find false heroes whom we expect to liberate us. The hardest, most discomfiting discovery is that each of us must emancipate himself.