 There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems. |
| The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose. |
| Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon. |
| Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party. |
| The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business. |
| The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class. |
| We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated. |
| Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak. |
| Industry is a better horse to ride than genius. |
| A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. |
| The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on. |
| The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart. |
| The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully. |
| Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible. |
| The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract. |
| The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race. |
| Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience. |
| Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism. |
| When all men think alike, no one thinks very much. |
| The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence. |
