To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.

America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.

When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.

The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

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.