It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.

A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time.

The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.

There are many who have grave scruples about deceiving but think it as nothing to deceive themselves.

Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.

The well adjusted make poor prophets. A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are. . . . Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware . . . still clinging to things that no longer exist.

It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.