I think the public library system is one of the most amazing American institutions. Free for everybody. If you ever get the blues about the status of American culture there are still more public libraries than there are McDonald's. During the worst of the Depression not one public library closed their doors.

Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.

We should draw on our story, we should draw on our history. If we don't know who we are, if we don't know how we became what we are, we're going to start suffering from all the obvious detrimental effects of amnesia.

The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability.

Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

I think that we need history as much as we need bread or water or love.