The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy.

Free institutions are not the property of any majority. They do not confer upon majorities unlimited powers. The rights of the majority are limited rights. They are limited not only by the constitutional guarantees but by the moral principle implied in those guarantees. That principle is that men may not use the facilities of liberty to impair them. No man may invoke a right in order to destroy it.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.

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

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