Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.

No totalitarian censor can approach the implacability of the censor who controls the line of communication between the outer world and our consciousness. Nothing is allowed to reach us which might weaken our confidence and lower our morale. To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth.

They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society.

More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.

Those who are in love with the present can be cruel and corrupt but not genuinely vicious. They cannot be methodically and consistently ruthless.

Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.

It is part of the formidableness of a genuine mass movement that the self-sacrifice it promotes includes also a sacrifice of some of the moral sense, which cramps and restrains our nature.