To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.

For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.

Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards.

Act strenuously, would appear to be our faith, and right thinking will take care of itself.

The ultimate binding element in the medieval order was subordination to the divine will and its earthly representatives, notably the pope.

Anyone who thus looks up has some chance of becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn.

Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally destined to emerge from the Revolution.

The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.

We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.

We must not, however, be like the leaders of the great romantic revolt who, in their eagerness to get rid of the husk of convention, disregarded also the humane aspiration.

Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment.

The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.

The humanities need to be defended today against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.

A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice.

According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication.

Very few of the early Italian humanists were really humane.

The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism.

The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must maintain the nicest balance between unity and plurality.

Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.

A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism.

Perhaps as good a classification as any of the main types is that of the three lusts distinguished by traditional Christianity - the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power.

To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy.

If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.

The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.

Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.

An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.

A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog.

A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses.

The humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth of knowledge and sympathy.

Democracy is now going forth on a crusade against imperialism.

To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.

If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.

The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service.

Tell him, on the contrary, that he needs, in the interest of his own happiness, to walk in the path of humility and self-control, and he will be indifferent, or even actively resentful.

If quantitatively the American achievement is impressive, qualitatively it is somewhat less satisfying.

The humanitarian would of course have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service.

The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.

Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.

It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

With failure, you just try again.

In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.

The moral turpitude of the boys of today appears to center in their failure to concentrate on any particular objective long enough to obtain their maximum results.

Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.