We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.

The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence.

Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.

Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.

The news and the truth are not the same thing.