This listening to truth and error, to heretics, to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lesson that humanity has ever been set to learn.

_The Ring and the Book_ is the embodiment of this terrible magnanimity and patience.

It is the epic of free speech.
Free speech is an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of a truism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new truth.

Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man.

He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted.