Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.

The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor.

If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life. If, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.

The only moral virtue of war is that it compels the capitalist system to look itself in the face and admit it is a fraud. It compels the present society to admit that it has no morals it will not sacrifice for gain.

People are too prone to think that the actual is the limit of possibility. They believe that all that has been done is all that can be done.

What do I consider a teacher should be? One who breathes life into knowledge so that it takes new form in progress and civilization.

Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.