You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.

Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.

Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.

We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.

I do not despise genius-indeed, I wish I had a basketful of it. But yet, after a great deal of experience and observation, I have become convinced that industry is a better horse to ride than genius. It may never carry any man as far as genius has carried individuals, but industry-patient, steady, intelligent industry-will carry thousands into comfort, and even celebrity; and this it does with absolute certainty.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory - to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.