man is by nature designed to live in the polis, the highest form of koinonia, community; that is man's end or goal if he achieves the full potentiality of his nature.

Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies.

A genuinely political society, in which discussion and debate are an essential technique, is a society full of risks.

It is a mark of civilised man that he seeks to understand his traditions, and to criticise them, not to swallow them whole.

Knowledge for its own sake was meaningless, its mere accumulation a waste of time. Knowledge must lead to understanding.

What I am arguing, in effect, is that the full democratic system of the second half of the fifth century B.C. would not have been introduced had there been no Athenian empire.

Ideal goals are a menace in themselves, as much in more modern philosophers as in Plato.

Historical explanation is not identical with moral judgment.

Faction is the greatest evil and the most common danger. "Faction" is the conventional English translation of the Greek stasis, one of the most remarkable words to be found in any language.

If I had to choose one which best characterized the condition of being a political leader in Athens, the word would be "tension".

In the western world today everyone is a democrat.

She had stayed home and worked hard and a posthumous recognition had eventually followed. Not that Buck hadn't worked hard, sure he did, but in the end the body won't hold up as a work of art.

A bed is a place where so much of life is played out - births and deaths and passions and dreaming - all the most fundamental moments of our fragile human existence.

See failure as an opportunity to try again with a relatively powerful approach, skill, knowledge and conviction. Redefine yourself.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so breath-takingly serious!

Doubt tempers belief with sanity.

it is better to be a part of beauty for one instant and then cease to exist than to exist forever and never be a part of beauty

I believe the more prepared you are physically, the better prepared you are mentally and the more you can then cope. Mentally you have to focus on the job in hand 100%.

I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.

There is sadness of when you're watching someone enjoy something that you think is substandard. The ineffable sadness when someone is happy and something is not as good as it should be.

In the age of strategy, advantage flowed from owning resources. In the age of wisdom, it flows from seeding and connecting them.