History is still in large measure poetry to me.

Only a fairy tale calls a constant condition 'happiness'.

The state incurs debts for politics, war, and other higher causes and 'progress'. . . . The assumption is that the future will honour this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go into bankruptcy. Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief.

Great men are necessary for our life, in order that the movement of world history can free itself sporadically, by fits and starts, from obsolete ways of living and inconsequential talk.

Neither in the life of the individual nor in that of mankind is it desirable to know the future.

There might be a fact of the greatest significance reported by Thucydides which will only be recognized as such a hundred years from now.

Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness...Permanence means paralysis and death. Only, in movement, with all its pain, is life.