If you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone.

The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power.

We have been fortunate enough to live at a time when virtue, though it does not triumph, is nonetheless not always tormented by attack dogs. Beaten down, sickly, virtue has now been allowed to enter in all its tatters and sit in the corner, as long as it doesn't raise its voice.

... a man can safely sacrifice a great deal as long as he clings to the essential.

It's not the sea that drowns you-it's the puddle.

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.

Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.