Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear.

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.

There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.