The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.

There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point.

The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.

A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.

Love-making is radical, while marriage is conservative.