Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way

Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment

A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others,thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.

Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.

Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.

Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin?