Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

God cannot be solemn, or he would not have blessed man with the incalculable gift of laughter.

Why do most Americans look up to education and down upon educated people?

But what is significant is that if you don't want to like and accept somebody, one excuse is as good as another. The objective facts don't matter, and the reasons are never as ‘reasonable' as we like to think they are.

The paradox of friendship is that it is both the strongest thing in the world and the most fragile. Wild horses cannot separate friends, but whining words can. A man will lay down his life for his friend but will not sacrifice his eardrums.

A university is not, primarily, a place in which to learn how to make a living; it is a place in which to learn how to be more fully a human being, how to draw upon one's resources, how to discipline the mind and expand the imagination; how to make some sense out of the big world we will shortly be thrown into.

The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.