Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.

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

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.

We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact

There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.

The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.