Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species.

If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveler's eye, determine the direction of the journey.

Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture

History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience.

Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.

One question that people always ask at home is never asked here: "What happened to Communism in Russia?" Everybody yawns when a visitor brings it up, because the answer is so obvious to every Russian. The answer is that there never was Communism in Russia; there were only communists.

The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.