Individualism is rather like innocence: There must be something unconscious about it.

Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.

He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.

In the history of mankind, fanaticism has caused more harm than vice.

The essence of the expert is that his field shall be very special and narrow: one of the ways in which he inspires confidence is to rigidly limit himself to the little toe; he would scarcely venture an off-the-record opinion on an infected little finger.

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.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.