A people's speech is the skin of its culture.
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.
America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is a chaos.
American capitalism has been both overpraised and overindicted. It is neither the Plumed Knight nor the monstrous Robber Baron.
Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.
In our culture we make heroes of the men who sit on top of a heap of money, and we pay attention not only to what they say in their field of competence, but to their wisdom on every other question in the world.
In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.
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.
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.
Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.
Men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal, but by the grandness of effort involved in getting there- or failing to get there.
Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.
Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.
Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.
The fact is that life has become a sweepstake. Millions of people who have lost the sense of being able to make anything of the collective effort of shaping their economic society, now expect fortune to descend like pie from the sky.
The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.
The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.
The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core strength within you that survives all hurt.
There is no crime in the cynical American calendar more humiliating than to be a sucker.
To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.
We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather, and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.
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 must rid ourselves of the view that only logical ideas can be political weapons. Ideas in politics are much like poetry; they need no inner logical structure to be effective.
What counted was not the facts but the fears.
When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.
When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.
Found 28 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).
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