Great Throughts Treasury

"Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal."

"Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned.... That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions."

"Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives"

"Men with faith can face martyrdom while men without it feel stricken when they are not invited to dinner."

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

"Morality, if it is not fixed by custom and authority, becomes a mere matter of taste determined by the idiosyncrasies of the moralist."

"Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort which it brings."

"No serious historian of politics would imagine that he had accounted for the protective tariff of the system of bounties or subsidies, for the monetary and banking laws, for the state of law in regard to corporate privileges and immunities, for the actual status of property rights, for agricultural or for labor policies, until he had gone behind the general claims and the abstract justifications and had identified the specifically interested groups which promoted the specific law."

"Nobody has worked harder at inactivity with such a force of character, with such unremitting attention to detail, with such conscientious devotion to the task."

"Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon."

"One has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so."

"One might say that a nation is politically stable when nothing of radical consequence is determined by its elections."

"Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men."

"Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience."

"Our faults and sins seem all the bigger when they are seen by the world against the excessively self-righteous picture that is our official version of ourselves."

"Our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. . . . The best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves."

"People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives."

"People who are tremendously concerned about their identification, their individuality, their self-expression, or their sense of humor, always seem to be missing the very things they pursue."

"Private property is. . . a system of legal rights and duties. Under changing conditions the system must be kept in accord with the grand ends of civil society."

"Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark."

"Propaganda is that branch of lying which often deceives your friends without ever deceiving your enemies."

"Religion, patriotism, race and sex are the favorite red herrings of foul political method – they are the most successful because they explode so easily and flood the mind with those unconscious prejudices which make critical thinking difficult. The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and will to carry on."

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

"So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it."

"Society can only exist on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no-one says exactly what he thinks."

"That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. . . . The opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough."

"The American’s conviction that he must be able to look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell is the very essence of the free man’s way of life."

"The art of practical decision, the art of determining which of several ends to pursue, which of many means to employ, when to strike and when to recoil, comes from intuitions that are more unconscious than the analytical judgment. In great emergencies the man of affairs feels his conclusions first, and understands them later."

"The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose."

"The Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively."

"The capacity to act upon the hidden realities of a situation is spite of appearances is the essence of statesmanship. It consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want. It requires due courage which is possible only in a mind that is detached from the agitations of the moment. It requires the insight which comes only from an objective and discerning knowledge of the facts, and a high and imperturbable disinterestedness."

"The central drama of our age is how the Western nations and the Asian peoples are to find a tolerable basis of co-existence."

"The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the naive self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul."

"The emotion of love, in spite of the romantics, is not self-sustaining it endures only when the lovers love many things together, and not merely each other."

"The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes."

"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on. The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully."

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

"The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act."

"The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully."

"The great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture."

"The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples."

"The greater of all perplexities in theology has been to reconcile the infinite goodness of God with His omnipotence."

"The lesson of the tremendous days through which we are passing is that men cannot live upon the achievements of their forefathers, but must themselves renew them - We cannot escape the elementary facts of life - that for a people there is nothing for"

"The life of a savage is beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical and capricious, the simplest thing is occult."

"The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof."

"The Many can elect after the Few have nominated."