Every mob, in its ignorance and blindness and bewilderment, is a League of Frightened Men that seeks reassurance in collective action.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner.

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.

In our culture we make heroes of the men who sit on top of a heap of money, and we pay attention not only to what they say in their field of competence, but to their wisdom on every other question in the world.

To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.

A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.