There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.

Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy--also cheap.

Few secret undertakings ever did any nation any good.

People who claw their way to the top are not likely to find very much wrong with the system that enabled them to rise.

Excellence is the eternal quest. We achieve it by living up to our highest intellectual standards and our finest moral intuitions. In seeking excellence, take life seriously-but never yourself!

What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.