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.

More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. 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.

The man who once cursed his fate, now curses himself - and pays his psychoanalyst.

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.

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.

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.

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