Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.
Disagreement produces debate but dissent produces dissension.
Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations.
American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.
It is very unlikely that the computer will displace the books, except in areas where we need information speedily.
The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his name or trademark.
The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media.
In America, communities existed before governments. There were many groups of people with a common sense of purpose and a feeling of duty to one another before there were political institutions.
Historians will not fail to note that a people who could spend $300 billion on defense refused to spend a tiny fraction of that total to keep their libraries open in the evening.
The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.
What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image.
No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
Climaxing a movement for calendar reform which had been developing for at least a century, in 1582 Pope Gregory ordained that October 4 was to be followed by October 15.
The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.
More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.
Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, ‘How dull is the world today!’ Nowadays he says, ‘What a dull newspaper!’
While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
Water, that wonderful, flowing medium, the luck of the planet – which would serve humankind in so many ways, and which would give our planet a special character.
God is the celebrity author of the world’s best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.