“Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.”

We need every human gift and cannot afford to neglect any gift because of artificial barriers of sex or race or class or national origin.

It is easier to change a man’s religion than to change his diet.

It used to be when we said, ”til death do us part,’ death parted us pretty soon. That’s why marriages used to last forever. Everybody was dead.

Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.

The ability to learn is older as it is also more widespread than is the ability to teach.

We end up with the contradictory picture of a society that appears to throw its doors wide open to women, but translates her every step towards success as having been damaging.

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.

We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.

I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples – faraway peoples – so that Americans might better understand themselves.

We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.

You just have to learn not to care about the dusty mites under the beds.

No country that permits firearms to be widely and randomly distributed among its population – especially firearms that are capable of wounding and killing human beings – can expect to escape violence, and a great deal of violence.

No one will live all his life in the world into which he was born and no one will die in the world in which he worked in his maturity.

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being.

Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.

Institutions of the newer participants in global finance had not been tested, until recently…recent crisis have underscored certain financial structure vulnerabilities that are not readily assuaged in the short run.

A democratic constitution, not supported by democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse, carrying down to the lowest grade in society the desire and ambition of political domination.

If the country is to survive as a democracy it will depend on voters who understand how our political institutions have evolved and the events that went into their creation.

You can’t name an institution that doesn’t depend on volunteers.

These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television.

The institution of marriage is obsolete.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Any place that anyone can learn something useful from someone with experience is an educational institution.