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

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 man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.

The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.

Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.