Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

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

Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burkes words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their countrys sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.

Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.

The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.

The prophecy of a world moving toward political unity is the light which guides all that is best, most vigorous, most truly alive in the work of our time.