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

There comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing.

Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.

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

A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.

When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.

You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.