It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power-power to oppress others.

It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.

When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else - we are the busiest people in the world.

All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.

By all odds, earliest man, so naked to the elements and to deadly enemies, should have existed in a state of constant shock. We find him instead the only lighthearted being in a deadly serious universe.... He alone, with childish carelessness, tinkered and played, and exerted himself more in the pursuit of superfluities than of necessities. Yet the tinkering and playing, and the fascination with the nonessential, were a chief source of the inventiveness which enabled man to prevail over better-equipped and more-purposeful animals.

A man's worth is what he is divided by what he thinks he is.

The future belongs to the learners-not the knowers.