It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.

Far more critical than what we know or what we don't know is what we don't want to know.

It is a juvenile notion that a society needs a lofty purpose and a shining vision to achieve much. Both in the market place and on the battlefield men who set their hearts on toys have often displayed unequal initiative and drive. And one must be ignorant of the creative process to look for a close correspondence between motive and achievement in the world of thought and imagination.

Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.

Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others.

One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perservereingly during fifty-five years; that word is failure

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.