The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.

The desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, has been the markof high civilisation both on the part of individuals and communities.

Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings throughout many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.