Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.
The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.
Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.
Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
A man cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life become useless.
We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.
The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.
Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.
The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.
The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.
The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself.
The first principle of a civilized state is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.
All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.
We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
Creative ideas come to the intuitive person who can face up to the insecurity of looking beyond the obvious.
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.
The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.
Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.
The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialised class.
Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.
What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...
The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.
Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.
Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.
Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.
He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important.
Politicians tend to live "in character" and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.
Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.
The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.
I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you later in the name of my principles.
A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.
A man cannot be a good doctor and keep telephoning his broker between patients nor a good lawyer with his eye on the ticker.
The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.
Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.
We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.