History is an indispensable even though not the highest form of intellectual endeavor.

Corporations have at different times been so far unable to distinguish freedom of speech from freedom of lying that their freedom has to be curbed.

Serious thinkers are few, and the world is ruled by crude ideas.

Generally speaking, men are influenced by books which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well, or which suggest to them ideas which their minds are already predisposed to accept.

Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.

Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.

To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false, is essentially a meaningless question.

All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

Virginia was in fact a landowning aristocracy, without nobility or merchant class, or any considerable small peasant farming class; and the other Southern colonies, except North Carolina, were on the whole similar to Virginia in these respects.