The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on.

Children today laugh at fathers who tell them about dragons. It is necessary to make fear a required subject; otherwise children will never learn it.

Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

What are all the orgies of Bacchus when compared to the intoxication of someone who completely surrenders to continence!

One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.

The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.