“I think that happiness resides somewhere between the extremes of personal, religious, and political. I think happiness resides where we understand someone else's point of view and needs. Happiness resides where we are not lost in the solitary dream.”

Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Quoted in the Chicago Daily News, June 11, 1958.

“Confusing ‘Character’ with ‘Temperament’”
Clearing the Ground (1986)
Context: The core in the mystery of what we call personality resides in the individual mix between character and temperament. The most successful personalities are those who achieve the best balance between the strict demands of character and the lenient tolerance of temperament. This balance is the supreme test of genuine leadership, separating the savior from the fanatic.
The human Jesus is, to my mind, the ultimate paradigm of such psychic equilibrium. He was absolutely hard on himself and absolutely tender toward others. He maintained the highest criteria of conduct for himself but was not priggish or censorious or self-righteous about those who were weaker and frailer. Most persons of strength cannot accept or tolerate weakness in others. They are blind to the virtues they do not possess themselves and are fiercely judgmental on one scale of values alone. Jesus was unique, even among religious leaders, in combining the utmost of principle with the utmost of compassion for those unable to meet his standards.
We need to understand temperament better than we do and to recognize its symbiotic relationship to character. There are some things people can do to change and some things they cannot do — character can be formed, but temperament is given. And the strong who cannot bend are just as much to be pitied as the weak who cannot stiffen.

"Mediasaurus: The decline of conventional media" http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote02.html - Speech at the National Press Club, Washington D.C. (7 April 1993)
Context: We are all assumed, these days, to reside at one extreme of the opinion spectrum, or another. We are pro-abortion or anti-abortion. We are free traders or protectionist. We are pro-private sector or pro-big government. We are feminists or chauvinists. But in the real world, few of us holds these extreme views. There is instead a spectrum of opinion.

Source: The Art of Life (2008), p. 35.

Chap. 1
Ways of Seeing (1972)

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 2, Chance, Risk and Malice, p. 41.

Source: 1800s, Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion (c. 1803–1820), Ch. 1, plate 4, lines 18-28 The Words of Jesus to the Giant Albion

War with Honour http://books.google.com/books?id=QmQDAAAAMAAJ&q="I+wrote+somewhere+once+that+the+third+rate+mind+was+only+happy+when+it+was+thinking+with+the+majority+the+second+rate+mind+was+only+happy+when+it+was+with+the+minority+and+a+first+rate+mind+was+only+happy+when+it+was+thinking", Macmillan War Pamphlets, Issue 2 (1940).