Alfred Whitney Griswold Quotes

#1. Things have got to be wrong in order that they may be deplored.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#2. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#3. Certain things we cannot accomplish ... by any process of government. We cannot legislate intelligence. We cannot legislate morality. No, and we cannot legislate loyalty, for loyalty is a kind of morality.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#4. Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#5. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#6. It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is not.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#7. Could Hamlet have been written bya committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the NewTestament have been composed as a conference report?

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#8. Liberal learning is both a safeguard against false ideas of freedom and a source of true ones.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#9. There will be certain things in a man that have to be won, not forced; inspired, not compelled.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#10. The liberal arts inform and enlighten the independent citizen of a democracy in the use of his own resources ... They enlarge his capacity for self-knowledge and expand his opportunities for self-improvement ... They are the wellsprings of a free society.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#11. This man, Comrades, has a nice smile, but he has iron teeth.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#12. There are certain things in a man that have to be won, not forced; inspired, not compelled. Among these are many, I should say most, of the things that constitute the good life. All are essential to democracy. All are proof against its enemies.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#13. If appeasing our enemies is not the answer, neither is hating them ... Somewhere between the extremes of appeasement and hate there is a place for courage and strength to express themselves in magnanimity and charity, and this is the place we must find.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

#14. A college education is not a quantitative body of memorized knowledge salted away in a card file. It is a taste for knowledge, a taste for philosophy, if you will; a capacity to explore, to question to perceive relationships, between fields of knowledge and experience.

Alfred Whitney Griswold