We Must Be Willing To Pay A

A Government At Bottom Is Nothing More Than A Group Of Men, And As A Practical Matter Most Of Them Are Inferior Men. ... Yet These Nonentities, By The Intellectual Laziness Of Men In General ... Are Generally Obeyed As A Matter Of Duty (and) Assumed To Have A Kind Of Wisdom That Is Superior To Ordinary Wisdom.

I Believe That It Should Be Perfectly Lawful To Print Even Things That Outrage The Pruderies And Prejudices Of The General, So Long As Any Honest Minority, However Small, Wants To Read Them. The Remedy Of The Majority Is Not Prohibition, But Avoidance.

The Difference Between A Moral Man And A Man Of Honor Is That The Latter Regrets A Discreditable Act, Even When It Has Worked And He Has Not Been Caught.

The Plain People, Hereafter As In The Past, Will Continue To Make Their Own Language, And The Best That Grammarians Can Do Is To Follow After It, Haltingly, And Not Often With Much Insight Into It.

The Taboos That I Have Mentioned Are Extraordinarily Harsh And Numerous. They Stand Around Nearly Every Subject That Is Genuinely Important To Man: They Hedge In Free Opinion And Experimentation On All Sides. Consider, For Example, The Matter Of Religion. It Is Debated Freely And Furiously In Almost Every Country In The World Save The United States, But Here The Critic Is Silenced. The Result Is That All Religions Are Equally Safeguarded Against Criticism, And That All Of Them Lose Vitality. We Protect The Status Quo, And So Make Steady War Upon Revision And Improvement.