While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes the right important.
In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable.
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
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.
In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
Where 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.
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.
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.
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.
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.
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.
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.
The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
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 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.
