The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.

The well being of democracies regardless of their type and status is dependent on one small technical detail: The right to vote. Everything else is secondary.

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance.

The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.