The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.

the insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies.

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.

We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.

By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.