Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)

One of the easiest ways to be irresponsible about power is to forget you have it.

To say a person is a coward has no more meaning than to say he is lazy: It simply tells us that some vital potentiality is unrealized or blocked.

They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

Something is born, comes into being, something that did not exist before - which is as good a definition of creativity as we can get.

The individual human is still the creature who can wonder, who can be enchanted by a sonata, who can place symbols together to make poetry to gladden our heart, who can view a sunrise with a sense of majesty and awe.

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.