A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.

In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet.

To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.

...the cosmology of a given age is not the result of unilinear, "scientific" development, but rather the most striking, imaginative symbol of its mentality- the projection of its conflicts, prejudice and specific ways of double-think onto the graceful sky.

The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.

The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.

The definition of the individual was: a multitude of one million divided by one million.