The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.

Our present addiction to pollsters and forecasters is a symptom of our chronic uncertainty about the future... We watch our experts read the entrails of statistical tables and graphs the way the ancients watched their soothsayers read the entrails of a chicken.

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.

A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.

Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.