Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.

Serious thinkers are few, and the world is ruled by crude ideas.

Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.

No class of Americans, so far as I know, has ever objected . . . to any amount of governmental meddling if it appeared to benefit that particular class.

Generally speaking, men are influenced by books which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well, or which suggest to them ideas which their minds are already predisposed to accept

The value of history is, indeed, not scientific but moral: by liberalizing the mind, by deepening the sympathies, by fortifying the will, it enables us to control, not society, but ourselves - a much more important thing; it prepares us to live more humanely in the present and to meet rather than to foretell the future.

History is the memory of things said and done.