The national distrust of the contemplative temperament arises less from an innate Philistinism than from a suspicion of anything that cannot be counted, stuffed, framed or mounted over the fireplace in the den.

Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream.

Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?

As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation’s educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

People may expect too much of journalism. Not only do they expect it to be entertaining, they expect it to be true.

Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character.