We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.

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

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

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.

The justification of majority rule in politics is not to be found in its ethical superiority.

There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.

The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts; it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.