Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom."

The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind -- the mind of a fighter -- in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man's first beginning.

We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.

Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor.

What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds.

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

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.