Ideas have significance for him only as a prelude to action.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness. The remarkable thing is that the cessation of the inner dialogue marks also the end of our concern with the world around us. It is as if we noted the world and think about it only when we have to report it to ourselves.

One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.

Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.

The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.