Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.

Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.

All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.

It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power-power to oppress others.

It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart. For we can win a man's heart one day and lose it the next. But when we break a proud spirit we achieve something that is final and absolute.