Every human being is born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process of learning.

Economics is not an attempt to generalize human desires or human behavior; but to generalize the phenomena of price.

A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys.

Education is ... the invitation to disentangle oneself, for a time, from the urgencies of the here and now and to listen to the conversation in which human beings forever seek to understand themselves.

To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.