Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.

Man's chief goal in life is still to become and stay human, and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.

For many people, an excuse is better than an achievement because an achievement, no matter how great, leaves you having to prove yourself again in the future; but an excuse can last for life.

The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power.

A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.