The goal of radicalism is to improve the human condition, not to prove one's own moral superiority.

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has— from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

It's almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns 'privately with the administration.' That's just a small sliver of Johnson's radicalism: replacing Feingold in the Senate with Ron Johnson would be a civil liberties travesty analogous to the economic travesty from, say, replacing Bernie Sanders with Lloyd Blankfein.

[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next.

You sometimes find something good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.

We need our radicals.

Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.

I never dared to be radical when young For fear it would make me conservative when old.

The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless: it is not loving, it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.

I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.