If your life doesn't end in failure, you haven't reached high enough. So it was failure I had to achieve.

A priest is a man vowed, trained, and consecrated, a man belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an intense esprit de corps. He has given up his life to his temple and his god. This is a very excellent thing for the internal vigour of his own priesthood, his own temple. He lives and dies for the honour of his particular god. But in the next town or village is another temple with another god. It is his constant preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious cults and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they will overcome, but they will never coalesce.

The crisis [the Great Depression] discovered a great man in Franklin Roosevelt...None too soon he has carried America forward to the second stage of democratic realization. His New Deal involves such collective controls of the national business that it would be absurd to call it anything but socialism, were it not for a prejudice lingering on from the old individualist days against that word...Both Roosevelt and Stalin were attempting to produce a huge, modern, scientifically organized, socialist state, the one out of a warning crisis and the other out of a chaos.

The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.

Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual man into the social masonry.

You are not mechanics, you are warriors. You have been trained, not to think, but to do.

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.