there are people who are born superficial ... They prefer not to have to deal with more than a limited number of oversimplified ideas - they prefer the book reviews to the books, the headlines and the leading paragraph to the full report, the generalization to the facts, and the negative to the positive.

There is nothing in the world so dangerous, or so overwhelming as stupidity; perhaps there is no more of it now than there has been at any time, but I do not think the witless of past generations had so much power. The powers of darkness are the powers of misdirected knowledge.

for every person who's stepped out of line and lived to regret it, there are two people who stayed in line because they got their values mixed and lost their nerve, and who have lived to regret it still more. You don't hear about those people because they're still in line where they don't show.

I don't want to get married ... I'm certainly not going to give up the work I've wanted to do all my life for the sake of it, any more than I'd expect my husband, if he were a doctor or a lawyer, for example, to give up practising medicine or law in order to marry me.

For every individual who really is exceptional there are about fifty thousand who just imagine they are - until it's too late, and they find out they aren't after all.

you cannot make a person believe anything unless that person has already had a conscious or unconscious vision of the same thing; you have no conviction of truth unless you have already apprehended it intuitively.

It's not facts that hurt people, it's their attitude towards facts.