Explore Quotations, Proverbs & Sayings

«Democracy is much too important to be left to public opinion.»

«Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate. . .»

«A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much. . .»

«The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.»

«Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.»

«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.»

«When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.»

«Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern.»

«The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being -- which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs -- where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will. . .»

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