Words Toward a Creed

There is a creed to which, in my judgment, all free men and women must forever hold fast...
We must learn that those we like are not always right and those we don't like are not always wrong.
We must learn to seek change without violence - not even in word, much less in deeds.
We must face fanaticism with courage and idealism with caution.
We must be strong enough to be gentle.
We must know that life will always have unbearable stretches of loneliness and that we can never truly be understood, not even by those who love us; that we cannot completely understand someone else, no matter how much we want it.
We must have the courage to live without absolutes, without dogmas, the courage to seek imaginative escapes from the straight jackets of conformity.
W must learn to meet life with a series of tentative and impermanent approximations, knowing that the final goals may never be reached, that the last truths may be forever unknowable but that life holds nothing more precious than the process by which, to the fullest stretches of which humans are capable, we stretch the mind and heart.
Leo Rosten