38 quotes
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.
Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.
A Preface to Politics (1913)
[A]ll achievement should be measured in human happiness.
A Preface to Politics (1913)
The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being--which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs--where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
Essays in The Public Philosophy (1955)
[T]he newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.
Liberty and the News (1920)
[L]ove, in spite of the romantics, is not self-sustaining; it endures only when the lovers love many things together, and not merely each other.
A Preface to Morals (1929)
In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.
[T]he present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.
Liberty and the News (1920)
[W]hether or not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
A Preface to Morals (1929)
For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.
Liberty and the News (1920)
[T]he totalitarian states, whether of the fascist or the communist persuasion, are more than superficially alike as dictatorships, in the suppression of dissent, and in operating planned and directed economies. They are profoundly alike.
The Good Society (1937)
[T]here is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.
The Good Society (1937)
[T]he modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at rest nowhere.
A Preface to Morals (1929)
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.
Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself.
Public Opinion (1922)
Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burke's words, a man to his country with "ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron." That is why young men die in battle for their country's sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.
Essays in the Public Philosophy (1955)
There are no conventions, no tabus, no gods, no priests, princes, fathers, or revelations which they must accept. ... The prison door is wide open. They stagger out into trackless space under a blinding sun.
A Preface to Morals (1929)
I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.