Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

He who has nothing and wants something is less frustrated than he who has something and wants more.

The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.

It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.

Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Successful action tends to become an end in itself.