In world history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture.

A man's indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.

It is my necessary breath of life to understand and expression is the only justification of life that I can feel without prodding.

Man is not committed in detail by his biological constitution to any particular variety of behavior.

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.

We do not see the lens through which we look.

Society in its full sense ... is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.