We find it easy to believe that praise is sincere: why should anyone lie in telling us the truth?

It is sometimes well for a blatant error to draw attention to overmodest truths.

I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.

If a given scientist had not made a given discovery, someone else would have done so a little later. Johann Mendel dies unknown after having discovered the laws of heredity: thirty-five years later, three men rediscover them. But the book that is not written will never be written. The premature death of a great scientist delays humanity; that of a great writer deprives it.

A body of work such as Pasteur's is inconceivable in our time: no man would be given a chance to create a whole science. Nowadays a path is scarcely opened up when the crowd begins to pour in.

There are moments when very little truth would be enough to shape opinion. One might be hated at extremely low cost.

It takes a very deep-rooted opinion to survive unexpressed.