Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.

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

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.

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.

The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity.

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