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 Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.

It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power-power to oppress others.

An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect.

Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.

To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.