It is grievous to read the papers in most respects, I agree. More and more I skim the headlines only, for one can be sure what is carried beneath them quite automatically, if one has long been a reader of the press journalism.

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.

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.

Comfort, however, easily merges into license.

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

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.

Action without study fatal. Study without action is futile.