In our changing world nothing changes more than geography.
Sooner or later the young always betrayed the old.
When one commits one’s self to an airborne craft and the door is fastened against earth and home, there is no escape even by running away. The result is a strange sense of peace – desperate, perhaps, but peace.
Our bodies can be mobilized by law and police and men with guns, if necessary-but where shall we find that which will make us believe in what we must do, so that we can fight through to victory?
If I have learned anything in my long life it is to be grateful for every occasion when I followed my sympathies and avoided my antipathies.
For Nature is not unjust. She does not steal into the womb and like an evil fairy give her good gifts secretly to men and deny them to women. Men and women are born free and equal in ability and brain. The injustice begins after birth.
What the common man cannot understand he hates.
The truth has never been told about women in history: that everywhere man has gone woman has gone too, and what he has done she has done also. Women are ignorant of their own past and ignorant of their own importance in that past.
At heart a truly modest man, he had nevertheless the modest man’s pride in his modesty in the face of achievement.
Only people who are assured of daily food can concern themselves with matters of principle and ethic. A man will become a slave rather than starve.
The older a people grows, the more it absorbs its own landscape and builds to it.
Only very coarse persons wanted wars.
The feeling one has after coming to know American women is that they are starving at their sources.
I do not believe there is any important difference between men and women – certainly not as much as they may be between one woman and another or one man and another.
I don’t wait for moods – you’d never get anything done if you did.
Love can never be a sin. It can be only a blessing. Even if you’re not loved in return – though I can’t imagine that – to love is a proof of life – indeed, it’s the only proof, for once you can’t love another human being, you’re not alive.
It is love itself that is important – the ability to love, no matter whom you love. For when you can no longer love anyone, you are no longer a living person. The heart dies if it loses the capacity to love.
As for inhibitions, I’ve spent a lifetime developing them, and I don’t intend to lose them.
The greatest problem that war leaves, in a man, is how to recapture reality. That’s because war is unreal.
Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us.