A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.

Say this much for big league baseball - it is beyond question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.

To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it - this is a hard lesson.

Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made

There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect.

Progress is the sum of small victories won by individual human beings.

Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.

And there is the headlight, shining far down the track, glinting off the steel rails that, like all parallel lines, will meet in infinity, which is after all where this train is going.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.

Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.

It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.

Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital - the world's best talents and greatest ideas.

I’d thought I knew what beauty was in women; but she’d surpassed all the language I had for it.

God has never disappointed me.

Hello," Magnus said to the monkey. The monkey did not reply. "I shall call you Ragnor.

We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.

I get a trickling few scripts that I'm lucky enough that some of them are great. I don't get loads of scripts.

When I was eight years old to be a spaceman was the most exciting thing I could imagine.

Not one song on the charts is being played naturally. But when you go see someone live it's special. Even though you can fool people, I know there are people out there who still play along to tapes.

I admire natural, untouched beauty.