People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.

I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

The substitution of meaning accounts for the grasping of misers as well as the extravagance of spendthrifts. Karl Marx well understood this peculiar transformation of flesh into coin.

Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.

The survival of American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to rely... on the strength of their own thought.

It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.

America is about class. To pretend that it isn't is very ignorant. No society has ever existed without some kind of a ruling class.

Anti-utopianism continues to suffuse our culture...Today few imagine that society can be fundamentally improved, and those who do are seen as at best deluded, at worst threatening.

Unlike every other nation in the world, the United States defines itself as a hypothesis and constitutes itself as an argument.

... Now to die of griefwould mean, I'm afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, particularly in the future. ...

Rule with the heart of a servant. Serve with the heart of a king.

The growth and development of the soul is more important than power and glory.

And my daddy could play a harmonica and also the guitar, so I guess I got a little bit from both of 'em, but I think mostly from my mother's side of the family.

Your mind believes what you tell it.

I only went a year to high school. I should have been in high school, but I was in a band, and when you're successful doing that - well, you aren't too likely to go back.

Take it and be thankful.

God's ability to clean things up is infinitely greater than our ability to mess things up.

There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem From insignificance.

All adventuring is rash, and all innovations dangerous. But not nearly so dangerous as stagnation and dry rot. From grooves, cliques, clichés and resignation - Good Lord deliver us!