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

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.

Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.

The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.

Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.

Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.