I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

We should be most careful about retreating from the specific challenge of our age. We should be reluctant to turn our back upon the frontier of this epoch... We cannot be indifferent to space, because the grand slow march of our intelligence has brought us, in our generation, to a point from which we can explore and understand and utilize it. To turn back now would be to deny our history, our capabilities.

You have to be eligible for luck to strike, and I think that's a matter of education and preparation, and character and all the other solid attributes that sometimes people laugh at.

A group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men.

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson - the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like MIT to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all of my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him.