If the Russians claim they are Socialist, this is just, I would say, a lie. They have no socialism at all. They have what I would call a state capitalism.

There is no word in our language which has been so much misused and prostituted as the word love. It has been preached by those who were ready to condone every cruelty if it served their purpose; it has been used as a disguise under which to force people into sacrificing their own happiness, into submitting their whole self to those who profited from this surrender. [...] It has been made so empty that for many people love may mean no more than that two people have lived together for twenty years just without fighting more often than once a week.

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.

The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.

The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

Finally one arrives at this: the state of sleep has an ambiguous function; in sleep, the lack of contact with the culture brings out the worst and also the best in us.

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found- in himself.