When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.

We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.

The Russians train; they do not dare educate.

Small wars are always teetering on the brink of becoming big ones.

Every mob, in its ignorance and blindness and bewilderment, is a League of Frightened Men that seeks reassurance in collective action.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

The way to prevent war is to bend every energy toward preventing it, not to proceed by the dubious indirection of preparing for it.