Anthony Lewis Quotes

We have learned by now, or should have, that the best-intended designers of aid programs can make ghastly mistakes in their sophisticated plans.

The First Amendment is very important, but it's not everything.

I was covering the Supreme Court when it decided Gideon v. Wainright, and the case has always had special meaning for me.

Americans, we passionately believe, are a humane people. We showed that in restoring wounded economies abroad after World War II, even those of our enemies, Germany and Japan.

Even a competent lawyer may not be able to mount an adequate defense against the state, with all its resources, if he has next to nothing for investigation and effectively works for starvation wages.

I'm a pro-capitalist, middle-of-the-road, tepid centrist.

There are values of humanity, culture, beauty, community that may require deviations from the cold logic of market theory.

Freedom under law is hard work. If rulers cannot be trusted with arbitrary power, it is up to citizens to raise their voices at injustice.

Desperation is a fact of life in many poor, overcrowded countries.

The only way to security for Israel and a humane life for Palestinians in their own land is political. No matter where the fault for past negotiating failures lies, there is no other path.

Congress has shortchanged not only foreign aid but foreign policy. A mistaken notion that diplomats are unimportant and hence undeserving of support grips conservative legislators, especially.

The Pentagon Papers case stands today as a barrier to silence by official edict.

We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy.

Attacking the indecency of life in much of the Southern Hemisphere is no longer a matter of grace, of charity, of patronizing kindness. It is a matter of intense self-interest.

Faith in reason was the foundation stone of the United States.

With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free.

East and West, most societies have come to believe that competition will produce more prosperity for more people than a planned economy. I share that belief.

Americans who visit Tuscany or Umbria love the landscape: the silvery olive groves, the fields of sunflowers, the vineyards, the stone houses and barns.

Is it 'left' to insist that presidents and CIA directors adhere to the law? I don't think so. I think it's American.