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

Everyone leaves the world a little better some by leaving.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

The cat, which is a solitary beast, is single minded and goes its way alone, but, the dog, like his master, is confused in his mind.

The crisis [the Great Depression] discovered a great man in Franklin Roosevelt...None too soon he has carried America forward to the second stage of democratic realization. His New Deal involves such collective controls of the national business that it would be absurd to call it anything but socialism, were it not for a prejudice lingering on from the old individualist days against that word...Both Roosevelt and Stalin were attempting to produce a huge, modern, scientifically organized, socialist state, the one out of a warning crisis and the other out of a chaos.

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.

It may be that we exist and cease to exist in alternations, like the minute dots in some forms of toned printing or the succession of pictures on a cinema film. It may be that reality is an illusion of movement in an eternal, static, multidimensional universe. We may be only a story written on the ground of the inconceivable; the pattern on a rug beneath the feet of the incomprehensible.