So many sins against the poor cry out to high heaven! One of the most deadly sins is to deprive the laborer of his hire. There is another: to instill in him paltry desires so compulsive that he is willing to sell his liberty and his honor to satisfy them. We are all guilty of concupiscence, but newspapers, radios, television, and battalions of advertising men (woe to that generation!) deliberately stimulate our desires, the satisfaction of which so often means the degradation of the family.

An act of love, a voluntary taking on oneself of some of the pain of the world, increases the courage and love and hope of all.

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.

Think what the world could look like if we took care of the poor even half as well as we do our Bibles!

Idealism in the young, I guess I'm saying, is curiosity as well as goodness trying to express itself.

Be close enough to people so that you are indifferent to the material. And also have faith.

Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it.