"Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are."

"It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government."

"If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are."

"Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach."

"Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry."

"The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is."

"You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war."

"It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art."