Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none.

War is the usual condition of Europe. A thirty years' supply of causes of war is always on hand.

Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?

Idlers do not make history: they suffer it!

My brother could not write about trifles. Even in society he became animated only when some serious discussion was engaged in, and he complained of feeling 'a dull pain in the brain'--a physical pain, as he used to say--when he was with people who cared only for small talk.

When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!

It is only those who do nothing who makes no mistake.