For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.

Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.