When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.

Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.

Explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable.

But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.