Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts.

people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.

The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind -- the mind of a fighter -- in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man's first beginning.

The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us.

There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.

Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.