Nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.

Ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion.

specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

The so-called materialistic conception of history, with the crude elements of genius of the early form which appeared, for instance, in the Communist Manifesto, still prevails only in the minds of laymen and dilettantes.

A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.