“A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.”

“We can defeat Satan much more quickly by praising God than by worrying.”

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...”

“Gather the courage to encourage yourself. Your self-motivation will energize you to dream of bigger ambitions to accomplish in life!”

“The secret of effectiveness is to know what really counts, then do what really counts, and not worry about all the rest.”

“A journey may be long or short, but it must start at the very spot one finds oneself.”

“Here I am...wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end--that there is such a thing as death.”

“The tendencies we have mentioned are something new for America. They arose when, under the influence of the two World Wars and the consequent concentration of all forces on a military goal, a predominantly military mentality developed, which with the almost sudden victory became even more accentuated. The characteristic feature of this mentality is that people place the importance of what Bertrand Russell so tellingly terms “naked power” far above all other factors which affect the relations between peoples. The Germans, misled by Bismarck’s successes in particular, underwent just such a transformation of their mentality—in consequence of which they were entirely ruined in less than a hundred years. I must frankly confess that the foreign policy of the United States since the termination of hostilities has reminded me, sometimes irresistibly, of the attitude of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, and I know that, independent of me, this analogy has most painfully occurred to others as well. It is characteristic of the military mentality that non-human factors (atom bombs, strategic bases, weapons of all sorts, the possession of raw materials, etc.) are held essential, while the human being, his desires and thoughts—in short, the psychological factors—are considered as unimportant and secondary. Herein lies a certain resemblance to Marxism, at least insofar as its theoretical side alone is kept in view. The individual is degraded to a mere instrument; he becomes “human materiel.” The normal ends of human aspiration vanish with such a viewpoint. Instead, the military mentality raises “naked power” as a goal in itself—one of the strangest illusions to which men can succumb.”

“You feed your fears to grow muscles against you when you run away from what frightens you. Little do you know that it’s frightened when you face it boldly!”

“That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.”

“You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better - the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read.”

“Nothing but ambition, nothing but the desire to get on, that's all there is in his soul," she thought; "as for these lofty ideals, love of culture, religion, they are only so many tools for getting on.”

“This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in fours to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism—how passionately I hate them! How vile and despicable seems war to me! I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. My opinion of the human race is high enough that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the peoples not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press.”

“People are simply not willing to look at their problems honestly and admit that they have problems.”

“they reach the altar. You are the supervisor before you get the title. If you’re not supervisor material, you still won’t be one even after you get the job. If you’re not good husband or wife material, you still won’t be one even after you say “I do.” Your mind is already where you were called to be while you await the actual fulfillment.