Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

But every one belongs to every one else