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.

The trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true.

We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.

All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.

But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you-the social reformers-see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.

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.

Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.