“A genuinely political society, in which discussion and debate are an essential technique, is a society full of risks.”

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

The United States (1971)
Context: The Senate has unlimited debate; in the House, debate is ruthlessly circumscribed. There is frequent discussion as to which technique most effectively frustrates democratic process. However, a more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.

Why We Must Not Reelect President Bush (2004)

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968)
Context: Intellectual freedom is essential to human society — freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate, and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economy, and culture.
But freedom of thought is under a triple threat in modern society—from the deliberate opium of mass culture, from cowardly, egotistic, and philistine ideologies, and from the ossified dogmatism of a bureaucratic oligarchy and its favorite weapon, ideological censorship. Therefore, freedom of thought requires the defense of all thinking and honest people.

[paraphrasing the view of Max Scheler], p. 25.
The Art of Life (2008)

Dissenting, Snyder v. Phelps, 131 S. Ct. 1207, 1229 (2011).

Today newspaper, 24 November 1990.
1990s, 1990

No. 33
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)