Great Throughts Treasury

"Intellectual and spiritual leaders hailed the cause of civil rights and gave little thought to where the civil disobedience road might end. But defiance of the law, even for the best reasons, opens a tiny hole in the dike and soon a trickle becomes a flood... And while no thinking person denies that social injustice exits, no thinking person can condone any group, for any reason, taking justice into his own hands. Once this is permitted, democracy dies; for democracy is sustained through one great premise: the premise that civil rights are balanced by civil responsibilities."

"1. The era of appeasement must come to an end. The political and social demands that dissidents are making of the universities do not flow from sound basic educational criteria, but from strategic considerations on how to radicalize the student body, polarize the campus and extend the privileged enclaves of student power. 2. A concise and clear set of rules for campus conduct should be established, transmitted to incoming freshmen, and enforcedwith immediate expulsion the penalty for serious violations. 3. It is folly for universities confronted with their current crisis in our turbulent times to open their doors to thousands of patently unqualified students. 4. No negotiations under threat or coercion. 5. No amnesty for lawlessness or violence. 6. Any organization which publicly declares its intention to violate the rules of an academic community and which carries out that declaration should be barred from campus. 7. We must look to how we are raising our children. 8. We must look to the university that receives those children. Is it prepared to deal with the challenge of the nondemocratic Left?9. Let us support those courageous administrators, professors and students on our college campuses who are standing up for the traditional rights of the academic community."

"A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals"

"All sport... is one of the few activities where young people can proceed along traditional avenues, where objectives are clear, where the desire to win is not only permissible, but encouraged."

"Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb."

"A tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government."

"An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike."

"I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all."

"I have often been accused of putting my foot in my mouth, but I will never put my hand in your pockets"

"Freedom of speech is useless without freedom of thought. And I fear that the politics of protest is shutting out the process of thought, so necessary to rational discussion. We are faced with the Ten Commandments of Protest: Thou Shalt Not Allow Thy Opponent to Speak. Thou Shalt Not Set Forth a Program of Thine Own. Thou Shalt Not Trust Anybody Over Thirty. Thou Shalt Not Honor Thy Father or Thy Mother. Thou Shalt Not Heed the Lessons of History. Thou Shalt Not Write Anything Longer than a Slogan. Thou Shalt Not Present a Negotiable Demand. Thou Shalt Not Accept Any Establishment Idea. Thou Shalt Not Revere Any but Totalitarian Heroes. Thou Shalt Not Ask Forgiveness for Thy Transgressions, Rather Thou Shalt Demand Amnesty for Them."

"I apologize for lying to you. I promise I won't deceive you except in matters of this sort."

"Some of the politicians in this country, in their feverish search for group acceptance, are ready to endorse tumultuous confrontation as a substitute for debate, and the most illogical and unfitting extensions of the Bill of Rights as protections for psychotic and criminal elements in our society. We have seen all too clearly that there are mennow in power in this countrywho do not represent authority, who cannot cope with tradition, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support revolution as long as it is done with a cultured voice and a handsome profile."

"If a theology student in lowa should get up at a PTA luncheon in Sioux City and attack the President's military policy, my guess is that you would probably find it reported somewhere the next morning in the New York Times. But when 300 Congressmen endorse the President's policy, the next morning it is apparently not considered news fit to print."

"In the United States today we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism."

"I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this: If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all."

"Perhaps the place to start looking for a credibility gap is not in the offices of the Government in Washington but in the studios of the networks in New York!"

"Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages."

"The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as the generation gap."

"The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands."

"There are people in our society who should be separated and discarded. I think its one of the tendencies of the liberal community to feel that every person in a nation of over 200 million people can be made into a productive citizen. Im realist enough to believe this cant be. Were always going to have our prisons, were always going to have our places of preventive detention for psychopaths, and were always going to have a certain number of people in our community who have no desire to achieve or who have no desire to even fit in an amicable way with the rest of society. And these people should be separated from the community, not in a callous way but they should be separated as far as any idea that their opinions shall have any effect on the course we follow."

"Three things have been difficult to tame: the oceans, fools and women. We may soon be able to tame the oceans; fools and women will take a little longer."

"This is the criminal left that belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the Department of Philosophy or the Department of Englishit is a problem for the Department of Justice. Black or white, the criminal left is interested in power. It is not interested in promoting the renewal and reforms that make democracy work; it is interested in promoting those collisions and conflict that tear democracy apart."

"They have formed their own 4-H club - the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history."

"Ultra-liberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order."

"To one extent, if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all."

"Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, lions and tigers alike -- I would swap the whole damn zoo for the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam."