Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.

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.

At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.

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

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