We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men.

Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves. ... Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius. But on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical and wasted.

The "brightness" of the 15 percent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions.

We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit.

The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.

We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.

Comedy is something that we can all share, no matter what language we speak or our background, it has the power to unite us all.