History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

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

We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure-all your life.

If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.

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

The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be.

Americans have always believed that-within the law-all kinds of people should be allowed to take the initiative in all kinds of activities. And out of that pluralism has come virtually all of our creativity. Freedom is real only to the extent that there are diverse alternatives.