If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.
Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.
What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.
History is, indeed, an argument without end.
The basic human rights documents-the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man-were written by political, not by religious, leaders.
In view of the tide of religiosity engulfing a once secular republic it is refreshing to be reminded by Freethinkers that free thought and skepticism are robustly in the American tradition. After all the Founding Fathers began by omitting God from the American Constitution.
Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics.
For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.
The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible “mixed economy,” thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied by both capitalists and socialists.
The first rule of democracy is to distrust all leaders who begin to believe their own publicity.
The passion for tidiness is the historian’s occupational disease.
Santayana’s aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.
Politics in a democracy is, at the end, an educational process.
All wars are popular for the first 30 days.
Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.
For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.
The very discovery of the New world was the by-product of a dietary quest.
Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment.
History is full of surprises.
Troubles impending always seem worse than troubles surmounted, but this does not prove that they really are.