What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.
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.
The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.
His supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show where the dangers are.
The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security and stake their own lives in order to do what they themselves think worth doing.
Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.
The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult.”The intolerable burden of thought.
If you ignore what a man desires, and you deny the very source of his power.
…we can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact.
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.
A man has honour 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 in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.
Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
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.
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 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.
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.
It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
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.
Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
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.
In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.
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.