Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.

America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner.

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.

Some of the more fatuous flag-waving Americans are in danger of forgetting that you can't extract gratitude as you would extract a tooth; that unless friendship is freely given, it means nothing and less than nothing.

Small wars are always teetering on the brink of becoming big ones.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

There is no crime in the cynical American calendar more humiliating than to be a sucker.