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.

When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else - we are the busiest people in the world.

It is compassion rather than the principle of justice which can guard us against being unjust to our fellow men.

The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.

To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.