Joseph Wood Krutch

“It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.”

“The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.”

“Cats seem to go along on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.”

“The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.”

“Up up and quit your books' is not an adjuration commonly thought advisable in universities but there are occasions -- as for instance, when studying Wordsworth when it might be advisable.”

“For a real glimpse into an almost vanished world, one should look...at a scorpion who so obviously has no business lingering into the twentieth century. He is not shaped like a spider and he has too many legs to be an insect. Plainly, he is a discontinued model--still running but very difficult, one imagines, to get spare parts for.”

“As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines. ”

“Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.”

“Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without. ”

“When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal, when he wantonly destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.”

“Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.”