Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.

Some people may have greatness thrust upon them. Very few have excellence thrust upon them. They achieve it. They do not achieve it unwittingly, by “doin' what comes naturally”; and they don't stumble into it in the course of amusing themselves. All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.

The individual who has become a stranger to himself has lost the capacity for genuine self-renewal.

To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning.

It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.

When hiring key employees, there are only two qualities to look for: judgement and taste. Almost everything else can be bought by the yard.

At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.