The most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize it, which is to carry it on in the same way after everyone has ceased to defer to it. The way to revive it is to show that it has grown out of and is still related to our most cherished values. But this requires radical insight and the stripping away of many things which are mere accretions.

In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.

Most [people] see education only as the means by which a person is transported from one economic plane to a higher one.

It is likely ... that human society cannot exist without some source of sacredness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.

We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.

Man is constantly being assured that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness. ... If he is with a business organization, the odds are great that he has sacrificed every other kind of independence in return for that dubious one known as financial.

The disappearance of the heroic ideal is always accompanied by the growth of commercialism. There is a cause-and-effect relationship here, for the man of commerce is by the nature of things a relativist; his mind is constantly on the fluctuating values of the marketplace, and there is no surer way to fail than to dogmatize and moralize about things.