Along with being forever on the move, one is forever in a hurry, leaving things inadvertently behind-friend or fishing tackle, old raincoat or old allegiance.

Ours must be the first age whose great goal, on a nonmaterial plane, is not fulfillment but adjustment; and perhaps just such a goal has served as maladjustment's weapon.

It is one of the sublime provincialities of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they've never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall.

For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance.

For tens of millions of people [television] has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.

In the history of thought and culture the dark nights have perhaps in some ways cost mankind less grief than the false dawns, the prison houses in which hope persists less grief than the promised lands where hope expires.

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.