There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.

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.

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts.

A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.

It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.

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