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

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride. They have yielded to the perennial temptation.

The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.

His supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show where the dangers are.

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security and stake their own lives in order to do what they themselves think worth doing.

Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

It is doubtful whether a supreme master of style could pack all the elements of truth that complete justice would demand into a hundred word account of what had happened in Korea during the course of several months. For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of meanings. Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow. There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the reader's mind as it did in the reporter's. Theoretically, if each fact and each relation had a name that was unique, and if everyone had agreed on the names, it would be possible to communicate without misunderstanding. In the exact sciences there is an approach to this ideal, and that is part of the reason why of all forms of world-wide cooperation, scientific inquiry is the most effective.

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

The modern skeptical world has been taught for some 200 years a conception of human nature in which the reality of evil, so well-known to the age of faith, has been discounted. Almost all of us grew up in an environment of such easy optimism that we can scarcely know what is meant, though our ancestors knew it well, by the satanic will. We shall have to recover this forgotten but essential truth ‑ along with so many others that we lost when, thinking we were enlightened and advanced, we were merely shallow and blind.

A useful definition of liberty is obtained only by seeking the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is to say, in the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment.

The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult."The intolerable burden of thought.

If you ignore what a man desires, and you deny the very source of his power.

There are portions of the sovereign people who spend most of their spare time and spare money on motoring and comparing motor cars, on bridge-whist and post-mortems, on moving pictures and potboilers, talking always to the same people with minute variations on the same old themes. They cannot really be said to suffer from censorship, or secrecy, the high cost or the difficulty of communication. They suffer from anemia, from lack of appetite and curiosity for the human scene. Theirs is no problem of access to the world outside. Worlds of interest are waiting for them to explore, and they do not enter.

...we can best understand the furies of war and politics by remembering that almost the whole of each party believes absolutely in its picture of the opposition, that it takes as fact, not what is, but what it supposes to be the fact.

While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom the necessity of listening is what makes the right important.

In a democracy the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional but must be maintained because it is indispensable.

A man has honour if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient unprofitable or dangerous to do so.

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.

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