The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.

Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.

The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.

Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.

Even God has been defended with nonsense.

The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts; it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.