How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.