Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. The crypto-businessman is the true revolutionary in a Communist country.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.

Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults.

People haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.

Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the self. Dedication in the obverse side of self-rejection. Man alone is a religious animal because, as Montaigne points out, it is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and despise ourselves.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

We see through others only when we see through ourselves.