"Herbert Sebastian Agar" was an United States/American journalist and an editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1934 for his book The People's Choice, a critical look at the American presidency. Agar was associated with the Southern Agrarians and edited, with Allen Tate, Who Owns America? (1936). He was also a strong proponent of an Americanized version of the British distributist socioeconomic system.

Agar's book The Price of Union was one of John F. Kennedy's favorite books, and he kept a copy of it on his desk. A passage from The Price of Union about an act of courage by John Quincy Adams gave Kennedy the idea of writing an article about senatorial courage. He showed the passage to his speechwriter Ted Sorensen and asked him to see if he could find some more examples. This Sorensen did, and eventually they had enough for a book, the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography/Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage.

More Herbert Agar on Wikipedia.

The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.

Civilization rests on a set of promises; if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.