There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.

We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.

Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.

A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.

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

Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government.