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.
There was an old abbot in one temple and he said something of which I think often and it was this, that when men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.
The only real danger to our country is from within, that we forget our own power to be what we want to be.
A foreigner is a friend I have yet to meet.
I learned to distinguish between the two kinds of people in the world: those who have known inescapable sorrow and those who have not.
All in all, Vermont is a jewel state, small but precious.
Vermont is a country unto itself.
War is the most devastating endemic and epidemic disease the human race has to endure, and yet too little has been done to discover and eliminate its cause by intelligent early control.
Life is the wonder with which we are all infused.
The highest civilizations – the longest to last and I believe the most successful in human terms – are those which have come the closest to achieving real understanding and mutual appreciation between men and women.
I am mentally bifocal.
If you start to revise before you’ve reached the end, you’re likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.
It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.
Once the ‘what’ is decided, the ‘how’ always follows. We must not make the ‘how’ an excuse for not facing and accepting the ‘what.’
Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.
It is not healthy when a nation lives within a nation, as colored Americans are living inside America. A nation cannot live confident of its tomorrow if its refugees are among its own citizens.
It is natural anywhere that people like their own kind, but it is not necessarily natural that their fondness for their own kind should lead them to the subjection of whole groups of other people not like them.