In societies like the American and West European where the dynamics of energy come from freedom and where the climate and the whole ethos are those of freedom, censorship is bound to be at worst, stupid; at best, futile; and always, to some degree, inconsonant with the character of the society as a whole.

We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.

Small wars are always teetering on the brink of becoming big ones.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

There are almost no limits to the discoveries of how the human brain operates in illness and health, in sleep and waking and dreaming, in calm and under tension. The question is how far man can put these discoveries to use without using them not for cure but for power.

The way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.

The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied.