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.

What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.

There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.

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.

Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never be a repetition of the past.

We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.

Politicians tend to live "in character" and many a public figure has come to imitate the journalism that describes him.