Great Throughts Treasury

"If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag - wash it!"

"Peace will never be entirely secure until men everywhere have learned to conquer poverty without sacrificing liberty or security."

"War and Christianity are incompatible; you cannot conquer war by war; cast our Satan by Satan; or do the enormous evil of war that good may come of it."

"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."

"The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values."

"I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democrat Party has adopted our platform."

"Dissent... is a right essential to any concept of the dignity and freedom of the individual; it is essential to the search for truth in a world wherein no authority is infallible."

"The difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted some ideas of Socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly."

"After I asked him [a student] what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement. No decent society can tolerate that definition."

"For I can assure you that in any war, even if it does not become a world war, I do not think there will be a victor who can do much. There may be one less badly off than the other. One side or the other may have sued first for peace. The destruction will be so great, the moral erosion of the experience will be so great, that it is idle to think you?ll find liberty, walking serenely among the corpses of the dead and the agonies of the dying. There are other things to do than that if we want democracy and freedom to live; there have to be other things to do than that."

"All our rulers have said that war is unthinkable, and then we think about it almost all the time. We?ve got to make it unthinkable."

"I always get more applause than votes."

"I am not a champion of lost causes, but of causes not yet won."

"The struggle against demagoguery scarcely fits the St George-against-the-dragon myth. Our democratic St George goes out rather reluctantly with armor awry. The struggle is confused; our knight wins by no clean thrust of lance or sword, but the dragon somehow poops out, and decent democracy is victor."

"The problem that confronts some of you younger ones ? you?ve got to find an alternative to war. War is something men have hated but yet cherished. Out of wars have come profit of various sorts, power, glory. Sometimes out of them has become a defense of freedom. But you will not get that out of the kind of war we fight now with the weapons that our great scientists have given us. We have got to find a substitute for war, and the substitute isn?t surrender."

"I walk where I choose to walk."

"The struggle is confused; our knight wins by no clean thrust of lance or sword, but the dragon somehow poops out, and decent democracy is victor."

"Rebellion per se is not a virtue. If it were, we would have some heroes on very low levels."

"To us Americans much has been given; of us much is required. With all our faults and mistakes, it is our strength in support of the freedom our forefathers loved which has saved mankind from subjection to totalitarian power."

"We are socialists because we believe this income which we all cooperate in making isn?t divided as it ought to be? We do reward men according to deed. We do reward or give to people according to need. No religion would be possible in which that wasn?t done. There are the young, there are the old, there are many whom we have to reward according to their need. But in spite of improvements that have been made, and especially perhaps by my liberal friends who aren't just sure how far to go...we still have a society where there's a great deal of reward not according to deed, not according to need, but according to breed - the choice of your grandfather is very important. And according to the successful greed, which operates not in terms of great contributions to men, but in terms of manipulations of one sort of another."

"You will keep America out of the hands of communists by what you do here, you will keep it by making it seem unnecessary to the disadvantaged. It has been the New Deal, it has been democratic socialism which has been a major force from keeping the world from communism."