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.

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

The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

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

To understand is not only to pardon, but in the end to love.

The news of the days it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.