In human affairs every solution serves only to sharpen the problem, to show us more clearly what we are up against. There are no final solutions.

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.

By all odds, earliest man, so naked to the elements and to deadly enemies, should have existed in a state of constant shock. We find him instead the only lighthearted being in a deadly serious universe.... He alone, with childish carelessness, tinkered and played, and exerted himself more in the pursuit of superfluities than of necessities. Yet the tinkering and playing, and the fascination with the nonessential, were a chief source of the inventiveness which enabled man to prevail over better-equipped and more-purposeful animals.

The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.

The real "haves" are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real "have nots" are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor.

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.