America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.