Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially selfish, with the general welfare.

They have not wanted Peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war -- as though the absence of war was the same as peace.

It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.

The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness; aggressiveness engenders hostility; hostility engenders fear, a disastrous circle.

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

After the earthquake and the fire comes the still, small voice.

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth.

Recreation is nothing but a change of work-an occupation for the hands by those who live by their brains, or for the brains by those who live by their hands.

Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings.

Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at seventy.

Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict.

Women have had the vote for over forty years and their organizations lobby in Washington for all sorts of causes; why, why, why don't they take up their own causes and obvious needs?

Lawlessness is a self-perpetuating, ever-expanding habit.

A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph.

The instinct to worship is hardly less strong than the instinct to eat.

Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict -- alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

Inventive man has invented nothing -- nothing from scratch. If he has produced a machine that in motion overcomes the law of gravity, he learned the essentials from the observation of birds.