For our democracy has been marred by imperialism, and it has been enlightened only by individual and sporadic efforts at freedom.

People don't care to read what they already think or what any people think - they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think.

On this earth, though far and near, without love, there's only fear.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.

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."

There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.

The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and its women.