If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it.

The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.

It is my strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made a servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.

I cannot live without books.