Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern. For there is no adequate way in which it can keep itself informed about what the people of the country are thinking and doing and wanting.

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

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

The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.

Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.