 Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach. |
| When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists. |
| When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers. |
| Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail. |
| What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority. |
| Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings. |
| The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth. |
| We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists. |
| It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf. |
| Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives. |
| Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men. |
| Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much. |
| A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state. |
| The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. |
| There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation. |
| Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark. |
| People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives. |
| The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters. |
| When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute. |
| In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs. |
