Every era of renaissance has come out of new freedoms for peoples. The coming renaissance will be greater than any in human history, for this time all the peoples of the earth will share in it.

People on the whole are very simple-minded, in whatever country one finds them. They are so simple as to take literally, more often than no, the things their leaders tell them.

Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.

Only people who are assured of daily food can concern themselves with matters of principle and ethic. A man will become a slave rather than starve.

We must have hope or starve to death.

I learned to distinguish between the two kinds of people in the world: those who have known inescapable sorrow and those who have not.

No one really understood music unless he was a scientist, her father had declared, and not just a scientist, either, oh, no, only the real ones, the theoreticians, whose language was mathematics. She had not understood mathematics until he had explained to her that it was the symbolic language of relationships. "And relationships," he had told her, "contained the essential meaning of life."