A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.

The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.

The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

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.

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

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 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.