Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.

Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.

Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern.

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

The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.

Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied; love and nothing else very soon is nothing else.

But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?