True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not a little more effective.

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

When all think alike, then no one is thinking

The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.

The news and the truth are not the same thing.

The present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.

To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.

It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?

I used to wonder if it was God's plan that I should be alone for so much of my life. But I found peace. I found happiness within people and the world.

Rights and empowerment are interconnected: unless a substantial number of women in a community come to believe that they have rights and demand to exercise them, right remains an abstraction.

When no one is left to tell what happened, family histories keep their secrets.

Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

Being emotional is normal? all part of the job.

Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out discretion, and so disappears the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.

Usually I'm able to imagine something and it comes out as I imagined, more or less.

All too many journalists seem to mistake scandal mongering for tenacious investigation, and far too many aspire to make themselves the story.

jokes are ideally pleasurable. They are an act of assassination without a corpse, a moment of total annihilation that paradoxically makes anything possible.