No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.
I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women.
A man’s indebtedness is not virtue; his repayment is. Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of gratitude.
The happiest excitement in life is to be convinced that one is fighting for all one is worth on behalf of some clearly seen and deeply felt good, and against some greatly scorned evil.
No one culture has ever developed all human potentialities; it has always selected certain capacities, mental and emotional and moral, and stifled others. Each culture is a system of values which may well complement the values in another.
Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.
The trouble is not that we are never happy-it is that happiness is so episodical.
If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.
What really binds men together is their culture, the ideas and the standards they have in common.
Our faith in the present dies out long before our faith in the future.
I gambled on having the strength to live two lives, one for myself and one for the world.
Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.
Success and failure in our own national economy will hang upon the degree to which we are able to work with races and nations whose social order and whose behavior and attitudes are strange to us.
The peoples of the earth are one family.
Our national experience in Americanizing millions of Europeans whose chief wish was to become Americans has been a heady wine which has made us believe, as perhaps no nation before us has ever believed, that, given the slimmest chance, all peoples will pattern themselves upon our model.
Traditional Anglo-Saxon intolerance is a local and temporal culture trait like any other.
Racism is the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority.
We grow in time to trust the future for our answers.
The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural.