"I had learned the value of silence in a place -- silence that is the imitation of absence, that permits one to be present as if absent, so that the life of the place goes its way undisturbed."
"A man should be in the world as though he were not in it, so that it will be no worse because of his life. His obligation may not be to make 'a better world,' but the world certainly requires of him that he make it no worse."
"Men who drudge all their lives in order to retire happily are the victim of a cheap spiritual fashion invented for their enslavement."
"I do not long to travel to Italy or Japan, but only across the river or up the hill into the woods."
"I seem to have been born with an aptitude for a way of life that was doomed, although I did not understand that at the time."
"Every man is followed by a shadow which is his death -- dark, featureless, and mute."
"We live in a fallen world by the dangerous presumption that
we are unfallen."
"It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are."
"In spite of all the talk about the law of tooth and fang and the struggle for survival, there is in the lives of the animals and birds a great peacefulness. It is not all fear and flight, pursuit and killing. That is part of it, certainly ... But there is peace, too, and I think that the intervals of peace are frequent and prolonged."
"Although I have become, among other things, a teacher, I am skeptical of education. It seems to me a most doubtful process, and I think the good of it is taken too much for granted. It is a matter that is overtheorized and overvalued and always approached with too much confidence."
"A tyranny of fanatical peace lovers is as credible to me as a tyranny of militarists, and I don't think there would be any difference."
"Take a simpleton and give him power and confront him with intelligence -- and you have a tyrant."
"It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing. The answer to big government is not private freedom, but private responsibility."
"In spite of our repetitious outrage at the violence in our streets and slums, we spend seventy per cent of our revenue on weapons -- and so prove beyond doubt that we cannot imagine a better solution than violence."
"... there is undoubtedly a limit to how long private integrity can hold out in the face of, and within, public disintegration."
"With the world in our power and our power assigned to the moral authority of those who will profit most by its misuse, we continue to bless and congratulate ourselves upon the boyhood honesty of George Washington."
"There is good reason, for instance, to suspect that the foreign mission programs of certain Christian denominations have served as substitutes for decent behavior at home, or as excuses for indecent behavior at home ..."
"So long as government speaks with a fervent idealism it is free to prolong its inertia and to indulge in expedient corruptions."
"They go to the country to rest, only to reproduce there the noise, haste, confusion -- and, surely, the frustration -- of city traffic."
"To be worthy of admiration in any final sense, government help will have to accomplish the result of making itself unnecessary."
"If a man continues long in direct and absolute dependence on the government for the necessities of life, he ceases to be a citizen and becomes a slave."
"That the land and its people could have been so far brought down is explainable only by the failure of governors to govern and legislators to legislate and judges to judge in the interest of those they are sworn to serve -- only by the subservience of our governmental ideals to the stupidity and greed of officials who have been willing to justify, by a spurious rhetoric of free enterprise, the right of the rich to get richer, by any means, at anybody's expense."
"... the people who might have been expected to care most selflessly for the world have had their minds turned elsewhere -- to a pursuit of 'salvation' that was really only another form of gluttony and self-love, the desire to perpetuate their own small lives beyond the life of the world."
