Our best people don't go into politics.

Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.

If our democracy is to flourish, it must have criticism; if our government is to function it must have dissent.

The greatest danger we face is not any particular kind of thought. The greatest danger we face is absence of thought.

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.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.