It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

The devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants.

The consent of the governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.

In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.

Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.

But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?

A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.