The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep |
The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind -- the mind of a fighter -- in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man's first beginning. |
The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own. |
The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. |
The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches. |
The enemies you make by taking a decided stand generally have more respect for you than the friends you make by being on the fence |
The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything. |
The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else- we are the busiest people in the world. |
The game of History is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle |
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings. |
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings. |
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness. |
The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself. |
The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us |
The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist. |