"If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life."

"A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority."

"Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership."

"Naivete in grownups is often charming, but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity."

"There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house."

"Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist."

"A man by himself is in bad company."

"What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?"

"It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor."

"Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith."

"There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his."

"It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem."

"Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled."

"A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come."

"It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression."

"Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners."

"The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity."

"Fear is uncertainty."

"We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution."

"Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor."

"To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are."

"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength."

"Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny."

"It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have 'something worth fighting for' they do not feel like fighting."

"When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths."

"The best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully."

"It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia."

"Children are the keys of paradise."

"Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem."

"In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

"The greatest weariness comes from work not done."

"The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop."

"The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax."

"The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind."

"The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility."

"However much we guard against it we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us."

"Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself."

"It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men."

"No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart."

"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life."

"Facts are counterrevolutionary."

"Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love."

"Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake."

"In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists."

"The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future."

"Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith-faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."

"The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not."

"Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true."

"The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody."

"It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents."