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

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

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.

For most people, political activity is a secondary activity - that is to say, they have something else to do beside attending to these arrangements. But the activity is one which every member of the group who is not a child nor a lunatic has some part and some responsibility.

Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.

In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel.

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.