Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
I was wise enough never to grow up, while fooling people into believing I had.
We make our own criminals, and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.
There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.
I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to his or her fellow human beings.
Each suburban housewife spends her time presiding over a power plant sufficient to have staffed the palace of a Roman emperor with a hundred slaves.
I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing...when we save our children, we save ourselves
Even though the ship may go down, the journey goes on.
It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet.
Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.
Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.
The pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one's mind.
Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.
If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.
It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.
And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.
Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.
