An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today; knowledge that would probably suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but it is dispersed and unorganized. We need a sort of mental clearing house for the mind: a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.

Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.

The passion for playing Chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world

The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.

To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this.

You are trying to do a more difficult thing than record folk songs; you are trying to record life.