A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.

The American Way is so restlessly creative as to be essentially destructive; the American Way is to carry common sense itself almost to the point of madness.

A great maxim of personal responsibility and mature achievement: "Do it yourself" is now the enthroned cliche for being occupied with nonessentials.

The moving van is a symbol of more than our restlessness, it is the most conclusive evidence possible of our progress.

Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.

We are neurotically haunted today by the imminence, and by the ignominy, of failure. We know at how frightening a cost one succeeds: to fail is something too awful to think about.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.