Going to school and working for good marks, indeed working for very good marks, was a serious business.

A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.

The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.

About 1900 my parents came to the United States as children from what was then the Polish area of Russia.

It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.

History is not always pessimistic for if World War II Europe has taught us anything it is that the rebuilding of cities is possible and the mending of a nation’s spirit can be achieved.

Nothing will drive us to our knees quicker than trouble.

It would behoove you to have your thesis finely tuned and the logical arguments utilized in support of it tightly woven into a credible, and creatively persuasive tapestry.

There's no such thing as bop music, but there's such a thing as progress.

I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.

It's not as if I knew answers which I am going to set down in the form of a novel or a memoir or a sermon. It's, rather, I'm going to search myself for what I might have to say in this area.

In the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to.

Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.

It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.

It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.