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

Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.

A prime function of a leader is to keep hope alive.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.

In the United States, to an unprecedented degree, the individual's social role has come to be determined not by who he is but by what he can accomplish.