When I was a kid I used to tell myself the moon was a silver gong and if I could climb high enough to beat on it with both hands all my wishes would come true.

People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.

If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

Individuality is freedom lived.

The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs

Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.

I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.

I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.

Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.

It's rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?

The zenith of the peak of mountains has to be balanced by the nadir of the depth of the seas.

Mistakes were made. Others were blamed.

A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

There are times for making war and times for making peace.

Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.

We Americans are the most lavish and showiest and most luxury loving people on the earth; and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen.

I always believe that the sky is the beginning of the limit.

Not to engage in this pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.

A man who is good enough to go to heaven is good enough to be a clergyman.