In the long run [censorship] will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, became great through experimentation.

Whether history will judge this war to be different or not we cannot say. But this we can say with certainty: A government and a society that silences those who dissent is one that has lost its way.

History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.

To yearn for a single, and usually simple, explanation of the chaotic materials of the past, to search for a single thread in that most tangled of all skeins, is a sign of immaturity.

Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.

Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change.