What's the use of inventing a better system as long as there just aren't enough folks with sense to go around?

On New Year's Day every calendar, large and small, has the same number of dates. But we soon learn that the years are of very different lengths.

If we could learn how to utilize all the intelligence and patent good will children are born with, instead of ignoring much of it - why - there might be enough to go around! There might be enough to solve our alarming human problems, to put an end to poverty, to stop waging wars.

Vermont is the only place in America where I ever hear thrift spoken of with respect.

help that is not positively necessary is a hindrance to a growing organism.

Vermont tradition is based on the idea that group life should leave each person as free as possible to arrange his own life. This freedom is the only climate in which (we feel) a human being may create his own happiness. ... Character itself lies deep and secret below the surface, unknown and unknowable by others. It is the mysterious core of life, which every man or woman has to cope with alone, to live with, to conquer and put in order, or to be defeated by.

There is no human relationship more intimate than that of nurse and patient, one in which the essentials of character are more rawly revealed.