Great Throughts Treasury

"Even the most farseeing, the most humane are also men of their times and consequently cannot be expected to transcend them too often without being marginalized."

"Liberalism was never a straight line to progress. Yet, every step of the way it is liberalism that is open to the human possibility, believing as it does in this invariable moral sense, turning the "ought" into the "is" for all of humanity. Human freedom and dignity can be more than a dream for the few."

"Where love, trust, mutual aid, equality, and empathy are not linked, the boot, whip, warring, modern inquisitors, and their epigones will supply a rhetoric that accepts humanity's fate as tragic while doing everything to perpetuate that tragedy."

"Democracy and its operative principle, the rule of law, require a ground on which to stand. That ground is the truth. When the government lies, or is structured like our national security state to promote lies and self-deception, then our official structures have broken faith with the essential precondition for constitutional government in democracy."

"We shall see that the national security state and the rule of law are mortal enemies. In the first place, by its nature and that mission that it has set for itself, the national security state’s apparatus needs arbitrary power. Such power has its own code, which is meant to govern or justify the behavior of the initiated -- after the fact. It operates to protect the state apparatus from the citizenry."