...in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.

The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious.

Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor.

Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.

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.

There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses.

In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.