HENRY STEELE COMMAGER

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

It's awfully hard to be the son of a great man and also of a half-crazy woman.

Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.

Loyalty ... is a realization that America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent.

… gestures toward constitutional anarchy

The American people ... have a stake in con-conformity, for they know that the American genius is non-conformist.

The new United States took the lead among the nations of the earth in the establishment of religious freedom. That is one reason America has never had any religious wars or any religious persecutions.

We can always find money for what the military wants.

Who would be cleared by their committees? Not Washington, who was a rebel. Not Jefferson. who wrote that ... "rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." Not Garrison, who publicly burned the Constitution; or Wendell Phillips ... a philosophical anarchist; nor [William] Seward of the Higher Law.... Not Lincoln ... or Wilson ... or Justice Holmes.

Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.

If our democracy is flourish, it must have criticism; if our democracy is to function, it must have dissent.

America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, became great through experimentation.

Our best people don't go into politics.

It is sobering to recall that though the Japanese relocation program, carried through at such incalculable cost in misery and tragedy, was justified on the ground that the Japanese were potentially disloyal, the record does not disclose a single case of Japanese disloyalty or sabotage during the whole war.

The decision for complete religious freedom and for separation of church and state in the eyes of the rest of the world was perhaps the most important decision reached in the New World. Everywhere in the western world of the 18th century, church and state were one; and everywhere the state maintained an established church and tried to force conformity to its dogma.

The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted.

In the long run [censorship] will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.

It is probably safe to say that over a long period of time, political morality has been as high as business morality.

History is organized memory, and the organization is all important!

The Americans who framed our Constitution felt that without freedom of religion no other freedom counted.

The English love for privacy is proverbial, and has not been exaggerated. A stranger who strikes up a conversation is looked upon with suspicion - unless he happens to be an American, when his ignorance of good manners is indulged.

Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change.