Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.

The tragedy of modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in effecting democracy.

Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious.

I don't see America as a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a storm arises, a formidable current develops, and it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment, another current will appear and bring the first one to naught.

At each epoch of history the world was in a hopeless state, and at each epoch of history the world muddled through; at each epoch the world was lost, and at each epoch it was saved.

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.

We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love; they cannot tolerate its defects.

Everywhere in the world the industrial regime tends to make the unorganized or unorganizable individual, the pauper, into the victim of a kind of human sacrifice offered to the gods of civilization.

What makes man most unhappy is to be deprived not of that which he had, but of that which he did not have, and did not really know.