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.

The true believer, no matter how rowdy and violent his acts, is basically an obedient and submissive person.

A compilation of what outstanding people said or wrote at the age of 20 would make a collection of asinine pronouncements.

Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.

No one has a right to happiness.

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

There is nothing more explosive than a skilled population condemned to inaction. Such a population is likely to become a hotbed of extremism and intolerance, and be receptive to any proselytizing ideology, however absurd and vicious, which promises vast action.