it is better in the long run to be cheated than to cheat. I have learned that there is no middle way.
Governments are best classified by considering who are the "somebodies" they are in fact endeavoring to satisfy.
The motive of success is not enough.
Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.
Great people plant trees they'll never sit under.
Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.
Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.
Be silent always when you doubt your sense.
I would be the last person who would say immigrants are not important to America.
As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
I regard myself as a religious. . . the temper of my mind as religious, and because I regard the temper of my mind as religious, I am profoundly skeptical about any form of human authority, any form of human self-importance.