We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.

The search for moral guidance which shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the acknowledgment of some new authority.

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 private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.

To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.

There is but one bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: The increasing knowledge of the world in which experiment occurs.

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