Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.

if we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.

When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.

Goodness that comes out of hiding and assumes a public role is no longer good, but corrupt in its own terms and will carry its own corruption wherever it goes.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

Jefferson, though the secret vote was still unknown at the time had at least a foreboding of how dangerous it might be to allow the people to share a public power without providing them at the same time with more public space than the ballot box and with more opportunity to make their voices heard in public than on election day. What he perceived to be the mortal danger to the republic was that the Constitution had given all power to the citizens, without giving them the opportunity of being citizens and of acting as citizens.

It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.