We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.

It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.

There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutionsto cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

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

People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.

Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.