The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.

Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.

The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.

An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.

The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.

Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.

What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.