by Walter Lippmann

There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. .... This is the sovereign evil against which the traditions of civility are arrayed.

A hundred years later the new man was nowhere in sight. So the early and softer gospel gave way to a later and infinitely harder one .. the human species had first to be transformed--or failing that, exterminated

And what is that bitter end? It is an everlasting war with the human condition: war with the finitude of man and with the moral ends of finite men, and, therefore, war against freedom, against justice,

The Jacobins and their successors made a political religion founded upon the reversal of civility.

If we knew all the stages in the development to maturity, and how to control them, we should have an adequate science of education, we could deal successfully with functional disorders, we should have a very great mastery of the art of life.

To replace the conception of man as the subject of a heavenly king, which dominates the whole ancestral order of life, humanism takes as its dominant pattern the progress of the individual from helpless infancy to self-governing maturity.

It is obvious that the trusts have created a demand for a new type of business man? for a man whose motives resemble those of the applied scientist and whose responsibility is that of a public servant.

If the reformers should, for example, arrive at the point of deciding to abolish private property in railroads, they would discover that most of the rights of property had already disappeared.

Private property will melt away; its functions will be taken over by the salaried men who direct them, by government commissions, by developing labor unions.

When a man buys stock in some large corporation he becomes in theory one of its owners. He is supposed to be exercising his instinct of private property. But how in fact does he exercise that instinct which we are told is the only real force in civilization?