The asking and the answering which history provides may help us to understand, even to frame, the logic of experience to which we shall submit. History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.