War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?

How weak our mind is; how quickly it is terrified and unbalanced as soon as we are confronted with a small, incomprehensible fact. Instead of dismissing the problem with: "We do not understand because we cannot find the cause," we immediately imagine terrible mysteries and supernatural powers.

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.

The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.

I said, 'If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn't we meet them a long time ago?