Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.

Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems.

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.