Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned....That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions.

Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.

The American's conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man's way of life.

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.

In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.

Because the results are expressed in numbers, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the intelligence test is a measure like a foot ruler or a pair of scales. It is, of course, a quite different sort of measure. Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and weight; it is an exceedingly complicated notion - which nobody has yet succeeded in defining.

A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.