“Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.”

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

If man has not found ways to deal with environmental problems such as water and air pollution by 1998, it will be too late. The future is not determined and it lies in our own hands.

My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.

Sooner or later I’m going to die, but I’m not going to retire.

Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.

in all cultures, human beings – in order to be human – must understand the nonhuman.

Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.

The negative cautions of science are never popular.

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.

An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing.

It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.

When I first saw Richard Pryor perform, I told him, ‘You’re doing a Jewish act.’

During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me.

Whenever I’m out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think.

We need to create the beauty and the quality first. The quantity will follow.