When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.

It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.

Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.

There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.

The difficult and risky task of meeting and mastering the new . . . is not undertaken by the vanguard of society but by its rear. It is the misfits, failures, fugitives, outcasts and their like who are among the first to grapple with the new.

The self-despisers are less intent on their own increase than on the diminution of others. Where self-esteem is unobtainable, envy takes the place of greed.

Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited.