We have to face the fact that most men and women out there are more stale than they know, more bored than they care to admit. - John W. Gardner

One of the reasons why mature people are apt to learn less than young people is that they are willing to risk less. Learning is a risky business, and they do not like failure.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all. Such extremism comes easily to men who have doped themselves with delusions of their own unblemished virtue and the rascality of others.