Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.

The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you survives all hurt.

Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.

Every mob, in its ignorance and blindness and bewilderment, is a League of Frightened Men that seeks reassurance in collective action.

Man must be at once more humble and more confident; more humble in the face of destructive potentials of what he can achieve, more confident of his own humanity as against computers and robots which are only engines to simulate him.

A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician.

A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

Some of the more fatuous flag-waving Americans are in danger of forgetting that you can't extract gratitude as you would extract a tooth; that unless friendship is freely given, it means nothing and less than nothing.

There are almost no limits to the discoveries of how the human brain operates in illness and health, in sleep and waking and dreaming, in calm and under tension. The question is how far man can put these discoveries to use without using them not for cure but for power.

The way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.

Principles-and I have in mind such principles as states' rights or national sovereignty or the free market or pacifism-have a way of drying up while the sap of life goes flowing in another direction.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

In the end, as any successful teacher will tell you, you can only teach the things that you are. If we practice racism then it is racism we teach.

Meiklejohn's position is that free speech in a democracy is not an absolute flowing from the boundless source of some presumed 'natural right.' It is a practical necessity of 'self-government by universal suffrage,' for if the citizens are not permitted to argue out the issues of government, how can they be what they must be in a democracy -- the rulers as well as the ruled?

The Seven Deadly Sins of the Press: -- Concentrated Power of the Big Press. -- Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly. -- Governmental control of the press. -- Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures. -- Big Business mentality. -- Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them from criticizing each other. -- Social blindness.

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.

We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.

It is not the armed forces which can protect our democracy. It is the moral strength of democracy which alone can give any meaning to the efforts at military security.