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.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.

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.

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.

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.

It is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent

Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man's capacity for making promises and keeping them.