You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

Often, the thing we pursue most passionately is but a substitute for the one thing we really want and cannot have.

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

Give people pride and they'll live on bread and water, bless their exploiters, and even die for them. Self-surrender is a transaction of barter: we surrender our sense of human dignity, our judgement, or moral and aesthetic sense for pride. If there is pride in being free, we are ready to die for liberty. If there is pride to be derived from an identification with a leader, we grovel in the dust before a Napoléon, Hitler or Stalin and are ready to die for him. If there is a distinction in suffering we search for martyrdom as for hidden treasure.

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.

Excesses are essentially gestures. It is easy to be extremely cruel, magnanimous, humble or self-sacrificing when we see ourselves as actors in a performance.

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.