Walter Lippmann

"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 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."

"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."

"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."

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

"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."

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

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