The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.
I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.
The whole universe is contained within a single human being – you.
A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.
The capacity to suffer varies more than anything that I have observed in human nature.
People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.
It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.
Poverty is... Curable like any disease. Ignorance, dependence, inefficiency, laziness, want of the spirit of enterprise are the real real causes of poverty.
A question that sometimes drives me hazy: Am I, or the others, crazy?
Everywhere man blames nature and fate yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passion, his mistakes and his weaknesses.
Our true nationality is mankind.
Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.
A man has to learn that he cannot command things, but that he can command himself; that he cannot coerce the wills of others, but that he can mold and master his own will: and things serve him who serves Truth; people seek guidance of him who is master of himself.
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Dignity does not consist in possessing honours, but in deserving them.
