If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.

I don't like people--much. This kind, I mean. And they don't like me at all, as a rule. Maybe the latter explains the former.

Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion. Determined ignorance is the hastiest kind of oblivion.

In Western society, and particularly in American society, imagination is stulified from infancy. The imaginative child is discouraged and upbraided. He is told that the process is mere dreaming, that it wastes time and leads nowhere. It is said to be "impractical." As the child grows and its imagination inevitably leads it to express unconventional ideas and to try new behavior, it is chided and even viciously punished for such signs of unorthodoxy.

The businessmen have corrupted liberty by trying to propose it as a material quality.

Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not.