The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his c… - Sydney J. Harris

The personality of man is not an apple that has to be polished, but a banana that has to be peeled. And the reason we remain so far from one another, the reason we neither communicate nor interact in any real way, is that most of us spend our lives in polishing rather than peeling... Almost everything in modern life is devoted to the polishing process, and little to the peeling process. It is the surface personality that we work on — the appearance, the clothes, the manners, the geniality. In short, the salesmanship: We are selling the package, not the product.

The world has always been betrayed by decent men with bad ideals.

The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us is not so much their intellectual powers and aptitudes as their curiosity, their energy, their fullest use of their potentialities. Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.