The Basis For Poetry And

The Most Powerful Drive In The Ascent Of Man Is His Pleasure In His Own Skill. He Loves To Do What He Does Well. And Having Done It Well, He Loves To Do It Better.

The Principle Of Tolerance, Fixed Once For All The Realization That All Knowledge Is Limited. It Is An Irony Of History That At The Very Time When This Was Being Worked Out, There Should Rise, Under Hitler In Germany And Other Tyrants Elsewhere, A Counter-conception: A Principle Of Monstrous Certainty. When The Future Looks Back On The 1930's, It Will Think Of Them As A Crucial Confrontation Of Culture As I Have Been Expounding It - The Ascent Of Man Against The Throwback To The Despots' Belief That They Have Absolute Certainty.

There Are Two Parts To The Human Dilemma. One Is The Belief That The End Justifies The Means. That Push-button Philosophy, That Deliberate Deafness To Suffering, Has Become The Monster In The War Machine. The Other Is The Betrayal Of The Human Spirit: The Assertion Of Dogma That Closes The Mind, And Turns A Nation, A Civilization, Into A Regiment Of Ghosts--obedient Ghosts Or Tortured Ghosts.

The Most Remarkable Discovery Made By Scientists Is Science Itself. The Discovery Must Be Compared In Importance With The Invention Of Cave-painting And Of Writing. Like These Earlier Human Creations, Science Is An Attempt To Control Our Surroundings By Entering Into Them And Understanding Them From Inside. And Like Them, Science Has Surely Made A Critical Step In Human Development Which Cannot Be Reversed. We Cannot Conceive A Future Society Without Science.

Knowledge Is Not A Loose-leaf Notebook Of Facts. Above All, It Is A Responsibility For The Integrity Of What We Are, Primarily Of What We Are As Ethical Creatures.