The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war.
The essence of man is imperfection. Failure is simply a price we pay to achieve success. If we learn to embrace that new definition of failure, then we are free to start moving ahead – and failing forward.
Freedom of religion, as the Founding Fathers saw it, was not just the right to associate oneself with a certain denomination but the right to disassociate without penalty. Belief or nonbelief was a matter of individual choice – a right underwritten in the basic charter of the nation’s liberties.
Hope, purpose and determination are not merely mental states. They have electrochemical connections that affect the immune system.
Education fails unless the Three R’s at one end of the school spectrum lead ultimately to the Four P’s at the other-Preparati on for Earning, Preparation for Living, Preparation for Understanding, Preparation for Participation in the problems involved in the making of a better world.
The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives – the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.
Do you prefer that you be right or happy?
Education tends to be diagrammatic and categorical, opening up no sluices in the human imagination on the wonder of the beauty of our unique estate in the cosmos. Little wonder that it becomes so easy for our young to regard human hurt casually or to be uninspired by the magic of sensitivity.
All things are possible, once enough human beings realize that everything is at stake.
Cynicism is intellectual treason.
We in America have everything we need except the most important thing of all-time to think and the habit of thought.
For every low there is an equal but opposite high.
The greatest force in the human body is the natural drive of the body to heal itself – but that force in not independent of the belief system. Everything begins with belief. What we believe is the most powerful option of all.
Although a man may have no jurisdiction over the fact of his existence, he can hold supreme command over the meaning of existence for him.
The only security for the American people today, or for any people, is to be found through the control of force rather than the use of force.
The real wealth, not only of America, but of the world, is in the resources of the ground we stand on, and in the resources of the humankind.
At a Dodger baseball game in Los Angeles, I asked Will Durant if he was ninety-four or ninety-five. “Ninety-four,” he said. “You don’t think I’d be doing anything as foolish as this if I were ninety-five, do you?”
It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.
Optimism doesn’t wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.
Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis – once that crisis can be recognized and understood.