No one so poignantly realizes the failures in the social structure as the man at the bottom, who has been most directly in contact with those failures and has suffered most.

National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals determine national events.

Perhaps I may record here my protest against the efforts, so often made, to shield children and young people from all that has to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all hazards on the assumption that the ills of life will come soon enough. Young people themselves often resent this attitude on the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences.

Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation.

A long-established occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his uncertain temperament.

The worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.

Things that make us alike are finer and stronger than the things that make us different.