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.

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

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

Prig and philistine, Ph.D. and C.P.A., despot of English 218c and big shot of the Kiwanis Club-how much, at bottom, they both hate Art, and how hard it is to know which of them hates it the more.

From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.

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

The test of interesting people is that subject matter doesn't matter.