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.

Fair play is primarily not blaming others for anything that is wrong with us.

We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.

Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.

Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.

Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding.