God is what man finds that is divine in himself. God is the best way man can behave in the ordinary occasions of life, and the farthest point to which man can stretch himself.
Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal, but by the grandness of effort involved in getting there-or failing to get there.
The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.
The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.
Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.
The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.
We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.
The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.
The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.
