Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Lacking the truth, [we] will however finds instants of truth, and these instants are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror.

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.