It's unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades for some principle or idea while neglecting the needs of its own people.

Some new machinery with adequate powers must be created now if our fine phrases and noble sentiments are to have substance and meaning for our children.

Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.

Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations. Man's capacity for decent behavior seems to vary directly with his perception of others as individual humans with human motives and feelings, whereas his capacity for barbarism seems related to his perception of an adversary in abstract terms, as the embodiment, that is, of some evil design or ideology.

Naturepitiless in a pitiless universeis certainly not concerned with the survival of Americans or, for that matter, of any of the two billion people now inhabiting this earth. Hence, our destiny, with the aid of God, remains in our own hands.

To ask for overt renunciation of a cherished doctrine is to expect too much of human nature. Men do not repudiate the doctrines and dogmas to which they have sworn their loyalty. Instead they rationalize, revise, and re-interpret them to meet new needs and new circumstances, all the while protesting that their heresy is the purest orthodoxy.

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