Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.

Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.

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

Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.

I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.