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Quotable Roosevelt

“We have to prove to our own people that we are cognizant of the qualities that it will require to meet the future years. The courage, the vision, the imagination, the honesty… I know we need a united [Democratic] party, but it cannot be a united party that gives up its principles. I want unity but above everything else, I want a party that will fight for the things that we know are right home and abroad.” 

– Eleanor Roosevelt, responding to Harry S. Truman at a Dec. 1959 dinner

Quotable Toynbee

“Every stable society imposes on the majority of its members the social and economic attitudes of its beneficiaries.

“A corollary to this obvious, but seldom applied, law is that a society is constantly evolving a new language of automatic self-justification.

“This language is to be found in its most polished and accomplished form on the leader-pages of all those newspapers which defend the existing social system. ... [It] is by scarcely disguised moral arguments that we are constantly urged to accept the present structure of our society.”

– Philip Toynbee (1965), in Encounter magazine, Stephen Spender & Melvin J. Lasky, eds.