"Inventive man" has invented nothing -- nothing "from scratch." If he has produced a machine that in motion overcomes the law of gravity, he learned the essentials from the observation of birds."

The kind of intelligence a genius has is a different sort of intelligence. The thinking of a genius does not proceed logically. It leaps with great ellipses. It pulls knowledge from God knows where.

Disillusion comes only to the illusioned. One cannot be disillusioned of what one never put faith in.

It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.

"Even in life [Sinclair Lewis] was fully alive only in his writing. He lives in public libraries from Maine to California, in worn copies in the bookshelves of women from small towns who, in their girlhood, imagined themselves as Carol Kennicotts. . ."