The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.

We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.

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 decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey.

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.

A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.