A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

...so mankind is now trapped by the failure of its energies and by the depletion of those natural resources that men have plundered wantonly.

Despite much talk in this land about religious freedom, churches and their schools now confront grave difficulties.

...ambition without pious restraint must end in failure, often involving in its ruin that beautiful reverence which solaces common men for the obscurity and poverty of their lot.

If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.

Rather than ennobling the public mind and cementing the social fabric, applied science speedily became the chief weapon of a gross individualism, which was anathema to the frugal and righteous (John Quincy) Adams, the source of enormous fortunes divorced from duty, the instrument of unscrupulous ambition and rapacious materialism. Presently, it came to scar the very of the country which Adams loved, a disfiguring process uninterrupted since his day.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.