The consent of the governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an insurance against benevolent despots as well.

The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians. He musses up what had been so tidily arranged.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

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.

In a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.

The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey.

We must abandon the notion that the people govern. Instead, we must adopt the theory that, by their occasional mobilisations as a majority, people support or oppose the individuals who actually govern.