The perfect bureaucrat everywhere is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility..

In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intol….

Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and come….

Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be..

Walking companions, like heroes, are difficult to pluck out of the crowd of acquaintances. Good dispositions, ready wit, friendly conversation serve ….

Don't be condescending to unskilled labor. Try it for a half a day first..

After each war there is a little less democracy left to save..

Everyone in daily life carries such a heavy mixed burden on his own conscience that he is reluctant to penalize those who have been caught..

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge..

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility ….

Real art is illumination, it adds stature to life..

New Yorkers are inclined to assume it will never rain, and certainly not on New Yorkers..

The cult of nature is a form of patronage by people who have declared their materialistic independence from nature and do not have to struggle with n….

The evil that men do lives on the front pages of greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred apathetically inside..

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work..

The cheese and wine party has the form of friendship without the warmth and devotion. It is a device either for getting rid of social obligations hur….

This nation was built by men who took risks-pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, businessmen who were not afraid of failure, scientists wh….

Although birds coexist with us on this eroded planet, they live independently of us with a self-sufficiency that is almost a rebuke. In the world of ….

In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting; there are only uninterested people..

It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth..