Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.

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.

It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

Man has an almost infinite capacity for taking things and people for granted and thereby missing out on the pleasure of being grateful that things aren't worse and of praising and thereby lifting the spirits of others.

It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.