A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician.

The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.

A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.

A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.

To reject the word is to reject the human search.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.