The one thing I have learned about editing over the years is that you have to edit and publish out of your own tastes, enthusiasms, and concerns, and not out of notions or guesswork about what other people might like to read.

Although a man may have no jurisdiction over the fact of his existence, he can hold supreme command over the meaning of existence for him.

We will not have peace by afterthought.

In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power but carries the ultimate responsibility.

The real wealth, not only of America, but of the world, is in the resources of the ground we stand on, and in the resources of the humankind.

No one has been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.