The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.

Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.

It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.

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

Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.