The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.

Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.

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 forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.

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