As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand; as long as he understands that he does not understand it.

Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.

When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea.

People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.

A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfill the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love.

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.