Through all the centuries of the worship of the mindless, whatever stagnation humanity chose to endure, whatever brutality to practice-it was only by the grace of the men who perceived that wheat must have water in order to grow, that stones laid in a curve will form an arch, that two and two make four, that love is not served by torture and life is not fed by destruction-only by the grace of those men did the rest of them learn to experience moments when they caught the spark of being human.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements-an d a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving.

Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

I am neither foe nor friend to my brothers, but such as each of them shall deserve of me. And to earn my love, my brothers must do more than to have been born. I do not grant my love without reason, nor to any chance passer-by who may wish to claim it. I honor men with my love. But honor is a thing to be earned.

I am interested in politics only in order to secure and protect freedom.

And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that. If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.