“We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.”

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.

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people’s wills.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

Hate is a fear, and fear is rot That cankers root and fruit alike, Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not, Strike with no madness when you strike.

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

The university is our culture’s assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.

Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.