The greatest single virtue of a strong legislature is not what it can do, but what it can prevent.

In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.

Like medieval theologians we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion... The perniciousness of the anti-Communist ideology of the Truman Doctrine arises not from any patent falsehood but from its distortion and simplification of reality, from its universalization and its elevation to the status of a revealed truth.

We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every ten minutes.

In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.

The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute.

With respect to the creation of the program, I introduced the bill in September 1945, immediately after the end of the war with Japan, in August of that year. A number of considerations, of course, entered into my decision to introduce the bill, growing from my own experience as a Rhodes scholar and the experiences our government had had with the first Word War debts, [Herbert] Hoover's efforts in establishing the Belgian-American Education Foundation after World War I, [and] the Boxer Rebellion indemnity.