Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Roosevelt's strength was that he understood he would never get anything through the Republican old guard, his party, unless the public pressured Congress.
And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. The superstition of the people was not embittered theological rancor.
Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment.
Obama, like Carter, is reacting to warning signs by seeking to split the difference between dispirited Democrats and increasingly radicalized Republicans.
The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.
Socrates gave no diplomas or degrees, and would have subjected any disciple who demanded one to a disconcerting catechism on the nature of true knowledge.
I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.
The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.
Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
George W. Bush has much to evaluate: he has presided over the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community's armed might as well as its pride of place and clan.
As the centuries pass, the evidence is accumulating that, measured by His effect on history, Jesus is the most influential life ever lived on this planet.
Hinduism's basic tenet is that many roads exist by which men have pursued and still pursue their quest for the truth and that none has universal validity.
I think the reason working-class people don't write books is because they are encouraged to believe that only certain people are permitted to write books.
The mind reproduces itself by transmitting its symbols to other intermediaries, human and mechanical, than the particular brain that first assembled them.
This is a dishonest administration, because it is becoming clear that the unemployment statistics of the [Barack] Obama administration are not believable.
If you are a white male, you don't deserve to live. You are a cancer, you're a disease, white males have never contributed anything positive to the world!
President Obama can talk about having no grand schemes and making no big gains, but the reality is he can't get anything of significance through Congress.
And Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society, so near to suicide, is the end for which Providence has prepared man.
I think if I'm controversial it's not because I set out to be. It's because I've never felt comfortable being part of someone else's mainstream community.
Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.
Counter-knowledge covers the propagation of false legends and conspiracy theories often used for political purposes or fundamentalist religious propaganda.
Islam and Islamic values now have a level of immunity from comment and criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism has never had.
A civilization is complicated, in the first place, because it is dynamic; that is, it is constantly changing in the passage of time, until it has perished.
The social sciences are usually concerned with groups of persons rather than individual persons. The behavior of individuals, being free, is unpredictable.
Negro banks, as a rule, have failed because the people, taught that their own pioneers in business cannot function in this sphere, withdrew their deposits.
Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.
The computer can help us find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol and our resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer.
We've got to figure out a way that we give a private sphere for our public leaders. We're not gonna get the best people in public life if we don't do that.
Jesus was the first great teacher of men who showed a genuine sympathy for childhood. When He said "Of such is the kingdom of heaven," it was a revelation.
Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.
By numberless examples it will evidently appear that human affairs are as subject to change and fluctuation as the waters of the sea agitated by the winds.
Beauty is but the sensible image of the infinite. Like truth and justice, it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law, it is a companion of the soul.
Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there.
The social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession
The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.
When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out.
The repudiation of the primacy of understanding means the repudiation of the norms of judgment as well, and hence the abandonment of all ethical standards.
Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back to an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.
It was hardly their own shining abilities alone that allowed a son, two grandsons, and a son-in-law of Winston Churchill to make their way into parliament.
In the U.S., highly selective renditions of its history have served in practice to impose blinkers on some of its citizens and catered to vested interests.
Under the influence of fear, which always leads men to take a pessimistic view of things, they magnified their enemies' resources, and minimized their own.
The act of apology is something that most societies take very seriously indeed. It is an admission of wrong done to the victims and an acceptance of blame.
From the beginning of the presidential nominating conventions in the 1830's really through the 1950's, you had conventions that actually did real business.
Margot [Hentoff] dislikes Bill Clinton because he's totally untrustworthy, and you really ought to have some faith in whoever's going to be your president.
[Barack Obama] pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated.
Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of [Barack] Obama are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their "deity."
Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie.
It's great to see countries like China and India lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by essentially copying Western ways of doing things.
Men seldom rise from low condition to high rank without employing either force or fraud, unless that rank should be attained either by gift or inheritance.