While it is generally agreed that the visible expressions and agencies are necessary instruments, civilization seems to depend far more fundamentally upon the moral and intellectual qualities of human beings-upon the spirit that animates mankind.

Viewed narrowly, all life is universal hunger and an expression of energy associated with it.

In brief, we who write are all in the same boat, as if we are survivors of torpedoes, and we hope to reach the shores of thought with strength for more activity.

Every great creative idea, formulated as a philosophy, has a social setting - in time, in a geographical location, in a political economy, in a matrix of interests and knowledge. It is not a free-swinging phenomenon like a balloon without moorings. It is not produced in a vacuum and, being creative, it does not work in a vacuum. Nurtured on things experienced and things known, it reaches out toward the unknown like a flower on a stalk growing out of the soil.

The interactions of business and culture, one upon the other, form one of the least explored phases of history. For such a study, no city would appear better fixed than Florence, so richly dowered with both economic and spiritual vitality.

Those who sit at the feast will continue to enjoy themselves even though the veil that separates them from the world of toiling reality below has been lifted by mass revolts and critics.

To ignore [the] great social facts -- political facts, if you please -- and over-emphasize the old moral responsibility of the 'domestic' mother is a hollow mockery and betrays a hopeless ignorance of industrial and urban conditions in the Twentieth Century. ... Everything that counts in the common life is political.