The education explosion is producing a vast number of people who want to live significant, important lives but lack the ability to satisfy this craving for importance by individual achievement. The country is being swamped with nobodies who want to be somebodies.

Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.

When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.

Our originality shows itself most strikingly not in what we wholly originate but in what we do with that which we borrow from others.

Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom."