“The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.”

“Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.”

“... in fact any good mind properly taught can think like Euclid and like Walt Whitman. The Renaissance, as we saw, was full of such minds, equally competent as poet and as engineers. The modern notion of "the two cultures," incompatible under one skull, comes solely from the proliferation of specialties in science; but these also divide scientists into groups that do not understand one another, the cause being the sheer mass of detail and the diverse terminologies. In essence the human mind remains one, not 2 or 60 different organs.”

“To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.”

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

“Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”

“You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.”