Anyone may so arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible. He is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.
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When I hear so much impatient and irritable complaint, so much readiness to replace what we have by guardians for us all, those supermen, evoked somewhere from the clouds, whom none have seen and none are ready to name, I lapse into a dream... I see children playing on the grass, ...they are restive and quarrelsome; they cannot agree to any common plan; their play annoys them; it goes poorly. And one says, let us make Jack the master; Jack knows all about it; Jack will tell us what each is to do and we shall all agree. But Jack is like all the rest; Helen is discontented with her part and Henry with his, and soon they fall again into their old state. No, the children must learn to play by themselves; there is no Jack the master. And in the end slowly and with infinite disappointment they do learn a little; they learn to forbear, to reckon with anther, accept a little where they wanted much, to live and let live, to yield when they must yield; perhaps, we may hope, not to take all they can. But the condition is that they shall be willing at least to listen to one another, to get the habit of pooling their wishes. Somehow or other they must do this, if the play is to go on; maybe it will not, but there is no Jack, in or out of the box, who can come to straighten the game.
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It is enough that we set out to mold the motley stuff of life into some form of our own choosing; when we do, the performance is itself the wage.
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Nor need we be surprised that men so often embrace almost any doctrines, if they are proclaimed with a voice of absolute assurance.
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There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the words, and try to divine how they would have dealt with the unforeseen situation; and, evidence of what they would have done, they are by no means final.
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We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.
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I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it...
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Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers.
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The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country.
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If we are to keep democracy, there must be a commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice
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Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.
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Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.... While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.
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