The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.

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.

The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.

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

Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.

What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.

Only the very rarest of princes can endure even a little criticism, and few of them can put up with even a pause in the adulation.