A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

A Pasteur, a Morse, an Edison, a Ford, a Wright, a Marx, a Lenin, a Mao Tse Tung are the effects of numberless causes, the causes of endless effects.

A proletarian dictatorship is never proletarian.

As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious. (or Albert Schweitzer)

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

In my youth, I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

One of the lessons of history is that 'nothing' is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

The fear of capitalism compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality.

The political machine works because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.

When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.