Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.

Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required.

The will to power, as the modern age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it, far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one. Power corrupts indeed when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before.

... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction betweenour present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.