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

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.

Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.

For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.