American thinking, when it concerns itself with beautiful letters as when it concerns itself with religious dogma or political the...ory, is extraordinarily timid and superficial ... [I]t evades the genuinely serious problems of art and life as if they were stringently taboo ... [T]he outward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always the virtues, not of profundity, not of courage, not of originality, but merely those of an emasculated and often very trashy dilettantism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I became President I was fully convinced that whatever might be true in Europe and of Europeans, in our climate and with the ...excitable temperaments of the Americans, the habitual use of intoxicating drinks was not safe. I regarded the danger of the habit as especially great in political and official life. It seemed to me that the example of excluding liquors from the White House would be wise and useful, and would be approved by good people generally.... I was not a total abstainer when I became President.... During the greater part of my term and at least for the last three years, I have been in practice and in theory a consistent total-abstinence man, and I shall continue to be so.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have given the best of myself and the best work of my life to help obtain political freedom for women, knowing that upon this re...sts the hope not only of the freedom of men but of the onward civilization of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no l...ess definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be... accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood.... Wealth ...and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness" ... has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into the ...heritage of Europe as though it were its patrimony--unaware, alas, of the fact that Europe's declining power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its concept of sovereignty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of ag...gression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political bei...ng.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they re...cruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »