If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.

Ever since man began to till the soil and learned not to eat the seed grain but to plant it and wait for harvest, the postponement of gratification has been the basis of a higher standard of living and of civilization.

The traditional educational theory is to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible ... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.

Advertising is a symbol-manipulating occupation

Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.

Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.