The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.

I suppose the advocates of unreason think that there is a better chance of profitably deceiving the populace if they keep it in a state of effervescence.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life, it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism.

I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.

Unrestricted nationalism is, in the long run, incompatible with world peace.