People are the common denominator of progress. So no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills,and the other familiar furniture of economic development. But we are coming to realize that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.

We shall have a race of men who are strong on telemetry and space communications but who cannot read anything but a blueprint or write anything but a computer program.

My rule on honorary degrees has always been to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Happiness does not require an expanding economy

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.