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.

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

Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.

In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief

It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.

The first principle of a civilized state is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract.

It was in the recognition that there is in each man a final essence, that is to say an immortal soul which only God can judge, that a limit was set upon the dominion of men over men.